X<' 



.^" 






o'?-' 



"-^A V 



^■% 



r ^r .^ 



V 



o-^ -^W. 



O 0' 



''^ v^ 



\^ 






aN 






EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 



EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 



BY 

GUGLIELMO FERRERO 

Author of "Greatness and Decline of Rome,' 
Ancient Rome and Modern America," etc. 




NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1918 






COPTEIOHT, 1918 

By DODD, mead AND COMPANY, iNC, 



APR 30 1918 



4i)CI,A494898 



PREFACE 

When the war broke out in August, 19 14, it was gener- 
ally supposed that it would be on much the same scale as 
the various struggles for the balance of power or the wars 
of aggression which had rent Europe asunder since the 
French Revolution ; an opinion which prevailed so long as 
to exercise no small influence on the conduct of the war. 
It is only indeed comparatively recently that governments 
and peoples alike seem to have realized that the present 
conflict is more far-reaching and more complex than a 
repetition of even the Franco-Prussian War on a vaster 
scale. 

The essays collected in this volume were all written to 
show the erroneousness of this idea and to prove that this 
struggle is not merely the continuation of the national and 
political wars of the nineteenth century, but rather a great 
crisis in what is commonly called western civilization — a 
crisis whose development will be far more extensive than 
was ever contemplated and whose consequences will far 
transcend the territorial ambitions of the various bellig- 
erent states. In order to prove this assertion, I have 
endeavoured to trace the component elements of this crisis 
with the help of what is generally known as the compara- 
tive method, studying modern civilization in the light of 
the civilizations of ancient times, trying by this means to 
discover their strong and weak points, and making use for 
this purpose of the comparative studies along these lines 
which I had made before the outbreak of war.* 

1 Cf r. Ferrero, " Ancient Rome and Modern America," Putnam. 
New York. "Between the Old World and the New." Idem. 

V 



VI 



PREFACE 



These essential elements of the crisis appear to me to 
be three in number. The first is of a military order — i. e., 
the rivalry between the Great Powers of Europe in the 
matter of armaments which began after the Franco-Prus- 
sian War, when for the first time in history the greatest 
nations of the world based their military policy not on the 
greatest possible limitation of armaments, as had hitherto 
been the case, but on the principle of the indefinite increase 
of men and weapons. 

The second element is the development of industry, more 
especially in its metallurgical and mechanical branches. 
These industries, which have become so powerful during 
the last century, have not only supplied European militarism 
with the means of indefinitely increasing their armaments, 
but, by providing incredibly complicated, rapid and power- 
ful weapons, have transformed the art of war into a kind 
of diabolical instrument of extermination. Until the nine- 
teenth century armies were light, easily handled swords 
with which duels were fought between states according 
to certain recognized rules in order to settle their disputes 
with the minimum expenditure of blood and money. In 
the century of metallurgy and mechanics they have become 
gigantic machines for the destruction of nations. 

The third element is of a moral and intellectual nature: 
i. e., that unshakable optimism, that blind faith in the 
progress and strength of man, that unbridled ambition and 
covetousness which has effaced or at all events dimmed 
the sense of limitation, of proportion, of the humanly possi- 
ble and the reasonable in the whole western civilization, in 
the realms of philosophy, religion, art, science, politics, 
finance, industry and commerce alike. Western civiliza- 
tion was on the way to thinking itself omnipotent. This 
malady had attacked all the nations of Europe to a greater 



PREFACE 



vu 



or less extent, but its ravages were greatest in Germany 
which had fallen victim to that megalomania, that insen- 
sate pride, that unbounded ambition, that deterioration in 
the morals of the masses which made a country, which for 
long had been regarded as the model of the world, become 
in a few short months its terror and detestation. 

These three elements gave birth to this war which 
knows no limits of time, space, destruction of life and 
property — an appalling phenomenon in the history of the 
world — a war which in its turn gave birth to a crisis in 
the whole of western civilization, owing to the overwhelm- 
ing shock to its political and moral order. 



I was specially pleased that an English translation of 
4:h'is book should be published in America, because the 
Americans occupy a peculiar position which makes it easier 
for them than for Europeans to follow these ideas. Is 
not the United States the living proof of their truth? If 
the European war were the last and greatest of the political 
and national wars of the Old World, it would not be easy 
to understand why the United States could not have re- 
mained neutral as it did in all preceding conflicts; if, on 
the other hand, it is a crisis in western civilization, it is 
easy enough to see why it could not be a mere looker on, 
since America forms part of that civilization. 

The Americans are not only in a position to understand 
this universal character of this crisis, but are also better 
able to profit by this truth in the work of reconstruction 
which must follow the present cataclysm. The position 
of America in relation to the great events of the last three 
years differs from that of the European Powers in so far 
as only two of the elements which have contributed to this 



viii PREFACE 

crisis are present in America : the industrial and the moral 
and intellectual. The first and most important — the mili- 
tarism which impelled Europe to the unlimited increase 
of armaments — is altogether lacking. 

This circumstance has had and will have various conse- 
quences. The fact that she had not taken part in the rival- 
ries of militarism was one of the causes which both obliged 
America to intervene and made that intervention more diffi- 
cult. It forced America to intervene because had she not 
done so, she would have been unable to create a great 
army, and had she not created this army, she would have 
found herself at the end of the war the only wealthy na- 
tion in the world, but at the same time wholly defenceless 
against Europe, which, while possessing numberless great 
armies, would be bankrupt owing to the expenditures of 
her whole capital on armaments. The vastest accumula- 
tion of wealth which the world has ever seen would have 
existed on one side of the Atlantic and the most formida- 
ble accumulation of armaments on the other side. It is 
difficult to say what would have been the outcome of this 
disproportion, but no one can fail to see the danger latent 
in it to the political and moral equilibrium of the world. 
It will be one of the chief glories of American democracy 
that it realized this supreme necessity and the other na- 
tions will give it credit for the great service it has ren- 
dered to civilization by improvising a great army at this 
critical moment in the history of the world in order to re- 
establish the equilibrium of power on the two sides of the 
Atlantic. This service will be still greater if, as is hoped 
by all enlightened minds, the new American army acts as 
the army of universal disarmament; if America itses her 
power, her wealth and the sacrifices she is making in the 
common cause to induce the European Powers to accept 



PREFACE 



IX 



loyally a military organization based on the principle of 
reduction of armaments to the lowest possible limit. 

Of the three elements which have contributed to this 
crisis, militarism has been the most active. Without it, 
as is proved by America, the other two would have been 
almost innocuous and it may fairly be said that this tre- 
mendous crisis of western civilization is the offspring of 
European militarism, as developed during the latter half 
of the nineteenth century. It is therefore obvious that 
this evil must be abolished if civilization is to be regenerated 
and no State can effect so much towards this end as that 
Power which was fortunate enough to be almost immune 
from it, namely, the United States, which has it therefore 
in its power to save our civilization. I do not think that 
I can better close this preface to a book whose aim it is to 
discover the means of this salvation than by expressing the 
hope that it may rise to its lofty task. 

GUGLIELMO FeRRERO. 

Florence, December 9th, 1917' 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface v 

CHAPTER 

I The Underlying Causes of the War i 

1 Quantity and Quality 3 

2 Anarchy, Liberty and Discipline .... 23 

3 The Great and the Colossal 40 

II Teutonism and Latinism 51 

III Ancient Rome and Modern Culture 85 

IV Italy's Foreign Policy 115 

V The Genius of the Latin Peoples 171 

VI The Intellectual Problems of the New World . . 193 
VII The Great Contradiction 215 

1 Patriotism and Progress 215 

2 The Two Sides of Progress 222 

3 A Ruthless War 225 

4 New Strength and Ancient Wisdom . . . 229 

5 Bacchus in Bonds 237 



CHAPTER I 

The Underlying Causes of the War 

i. quantity and quality 

2. anarchy^ liberty and discipline 

3. the great and the colossal 



EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

QUANTITY AND QUALITY 



The first impression made by America on the European who 
sees it from the windows of a railway carriage is that of an 
immense desert. In the Argentine he sees boundless green 
plains, whose monotony is broken only by an occasional 
group of three or four one-storied houses behind a railway 
station — groups almost too few and far between to make 
him realize that the desert is inhabited by man. In Brazil 
he sees range after range of gloomy mountains with here 
and there a lighter patch, where the forest has been cleared 
to make room for coffee plantations. But on plain and 
mountain alike he seeks in vain for signs of the presence of 
man. The train runs for hours without passing through 
so much as a village. It is the same in North America, at 
all events in the Western States, where vast, dreary stretches 
of country meet the eye. True, villages are more numer- 
ous and less scattered, and suddenly the traveller sees that 
the train is passing houses, more and more houses, great 
factory chimneys bristle on either hand, lofty buildings 
tower over the ordinary buildings like giants over a multi- 
tude of dwarfs and he catches glimpses of streets with 
hurrying motor cars and trams. He is passing through 
an important town, where half a million, a million or even 
two million of his fellow men live crowded together under 

the shadows of the myriad chimneys surrounded by an al- 

3 



4 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

most deserted countryside. Soon the train leaves the 
haunts of men once more and rushes into the melancholy 
solitude of the desert plains. 

A strange sight, this boundless void, to the European, who 
has lived all his life in one of the most densely populated 
countries of the world, where dwellings of man are to be 
found everywhere from the sea shore to the loftiest inhab- 
itable mountain peaks. Desolate as these plains and moun- 
tains may appear, they are however not unknown to man, 
whose unremitting toil forces them to yield every year im- 
mense quantities of grain, cotton, tobacco, coffee, wool, 
meat, gold, silver, copper, iron and coal — a boundless stream 
of wealth which flows over the whole world. These raw 
materials are worked up in the great manufacturing centres 
of the United States with almost incredible rapidity. 
Even if Europeans tend to exaggerate everything concern- 
ing America, its marvels and its horrors alike, there is one 
thing which exceeds their estimate of it, namely, its riches. 
In no place or period has man succeeded in producing such 
boundless wealth in so short a space of time as he has done 
in the United States and in the great republics of South 
America, such as the Argentine and Brazil, since the middle 
of the nineteenth century. We might well believe that he 
had discovered beyond the shores of the Atlantic the fabu- 
lous garden of the Hesperides for which he had so long 
sought in vain, the promised land which for centuries to 
come will provide mankind with food, clothing, metals and 
fuel enough to satisfy the wildest dreams of avarice; the 
land of plenty which is one day to banish from the world the 
scourge of famine, before which it trembled for so many 
centuries. If we bear this in mind, we shall realize the im- 
portance of all that has taken place during the last fifty 
years in the plains, mountains and cities of America and the 



QUANTITY AND QUALITY 6 

great role which the countries of the New World now play. 
The riches of America would not, however, be one of the 
most remarkable historical phenomena of our age, if they 
merely furnished man with powers of action and enjoyment 
such as he has never before possessed. Their effect is at 
once wider and deeper, for they are hastening the end of a 
movement which began more than a century ago — one which 
threatens to overwhelm the very foundations of our civiliza- 
tion; they place before us a formidable problem, the most 
serious, in my opinion, which we have to face ; the problem, 
which together with the influence, hatred or admiration of 
the riches of America, lies at the bottom of almost all the 
moral and social difficulties surrounding us : the problem of 
progress. This statement may appear perhaps obscure: I 
will now endeavour to explain it. 

II 

The wealth of America ! We constantly hear this spoken 
of in Europe, frequently with envy, as if it were the riches 
of some uncivilized people which, in order to acquire the 
treasures of the earth, looks with contempt on the things 
of the intellect. One does not, however, need to travel in 
America in order to realize that the Americans are 
no mere barbarians, wholly given over to money grub- 
bing. I can only here give a few instances from North 
America, but they would almost all apply on a smaller scale 
to the great States of Southern America. The effort made 
by the Americans to establish schools all over the country 
would in itself be sufficient to refute such an accusation. 
You have all heard of the great American universities, such 
as Harvard and Columbia. These institutions are real 
cities of learning, with splendid buildings, gardens, laborato- 



6 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

ries, museums, libraries, playing fields and swimming baths. 
The beauty and comfort of the buildings are in themselves 
a proof of the esteem accorded to learning, but of this the 
scholastic program affords even more striking evidence. It 
may safely be said that everything which can be taught is 
taught : all languages, living and dead ; the histories and lit- 
eratures of every land, both ancient and modern, which have 
influenced the development of civilization ; all sciences, both 
theoretical and practical. Millions are required annually 
for the upkeep of these buildings and the support of the 
professors, yet nearly all these great universities are wholly 
independent of the State. They are maintained by the fees 
paid by the students and by the generosity of the rich. 
Bankers, manufacturers and business men contribute a large 
proportion of the sum required for the salaries of all these 
professors of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, philosophy, mathe- 
matics, etc. Nor do the universities absorb all the money 
spent by public bodies and the wealthy classes on education. 
Everywhere we find museums, libraries and Schools of every 
kind for both men and women of every class set up by 
cities, states and millionaires for the spread of general 
education and professional training. Face to face with 
these facts, it is difficult to say that the upper classes in 
America care about nothing but money. It may be asserted 
that they are lacking in taste, that their towns are hideous. 
It would undoubtedly require some courage to say that 
American cities are beautiful, but it would none the less be 
unjust to say that the American is indifferent to beauty or 
to deny that he makes great efforts to beautify his country. 
All the architectural schools of Europe, those of Paris 
above all, are full of enthusiastic American students. 
Fabulous sums are spent on fine public buildings by towns, 
states, banks, insurance companies, universities and railways. 



QUANTITY AND QUALITY 7 

These edifices may not be masterpieces, but it can hardly 
be denied that some of them are very handsome and that 
America possesses many talented architects. We con- 
stantly hear it asserted in Europe that Americans give high 
prices for antiques or so-called antiques and are incapable 
of distinguishing between the really beautiful and the medi- 
ocre, the genuine and the faked. But those who have vis- 
ited rich Americans in their homes know that while the 
pretentious and the dupe are to be found in America as in 
every other country, there are also many Americans who 
are real connoisseurs. 

A writer given to paradox might even assert that Amer- 
icans are more idealistic than Europeans, if the desire to 
understand, admire and assimilate everything — art, ideas 
and religions alike — is to be regarded as a proof of ideal- 
ism. Go to New York : you will see in the streets speci- 
mens of every kind of architecture; every religion is repre- 
sented in its churches; every school of music in its theatres; 
every style of decorative art in its houses. Now New York 
is typical of that spirit of universal reconciliation, somewhat 
vague and superficial perhaps, but vigorous and sincere, 
characteristic of contemporary America, of which prag- 
matism is the philosophic expression. When pragmatism 
affirmed that all useful ideas are true, did it really intend, 
as has been alleged, to subordinate the ideal to the practical ? 
I hardly think it is possible to believe this when one has 
once breathed American air. No, pragmatism is essentially 
a doctrine of conciliation. Its aim is to afford man the 
means of reconciling opposing ideas and doctrines by prov- 
ing that all ideas, even those which appear mutually ex- 
clusive, may help to become wiser, stronger and better. 
Why then struggle for the triumph of one to the detriment 
of the other instead of allowing man to take from each all 



8 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

the good that each has to offer? Those who know North 
America will say that if there be a distinctively American 
doctrine, it is this. Many philosophic objections might of 
course be made to such a doctrine, but, whether it be true 
or false, it proves that the people which conceived it, far 
from despising the ideal, has such a respect for all ideas, 
that it has not the courage to reject any one of them. 

But for the Hmitations of space, many analogous in- 
stances might be cited. There are rich, uneducated people 
in America as elsewhere, but the boor rolling in money is 
a mythical being. Nor is this surprising. Modern society 
is so constituted that it is impossible to conceive of a nation 
which is both wealthy and ignorant. Modern industry, 
commerce and agriculture demand special technical knowl- 
edge and a highly perfected social organization; in other 
words, a high degree of scientific and judicial culture. 
America cannot therefore be said to be indifferent to the 
things of the intellect; it would be more correct to say that 
she is less interested in them as a people than in industry, 
commerce and agriculture. But is not this the case also in 
Europe? Who would venture to assert that the progress 
of literature, art and science is the dominant interest of 
the governments and upper classes of the Old World? 
Listen to the conversation of those around us. What are 
its topics? The perfecting of industrial machinery, the 
development of coal and iron mines, the utilization of 
waterfalls, and the expansion of industries and commerce. 
Kings who reign by the grace of God declare publicly that 
they have nothing so much at heart as the commerce o.f their 
countries! If this be American barbarism, it must be ad- 
mitted that Europe is being Americanized with alarming 
rapidity. This economic effort of Europe is not, however, 
in the least surprising: it is but the dizzy speeding up of a 



QUANTITY AND QUALITY 9 

great historical movement which began in the far-away days 
when an obscure and tenacious Genoese spread his canvas 
and set sail across the ocean for the unknown West. 
Europe had, indeed, given birth to miracles of art and liter- 
ature, to profound systems of philosophy, lofty moral stand- 
ards and learned codes of law — but she was poor; she pro- 
duced but little and that little slowly. She had made gods 
of tradition and authority; she had set bounds to the energy 
of man by means of laws, prejudices and precepts ; she bent 
the pride of man by telling him unceasingly that he was 
weak, unstable, corrupt and — to quote Virgil's metaphor 
— like the boatman rowing slowly against the stream. 
Woe to him if for a single moment he relaxes his efforts 
to make headway against the current which is ever ready 
to carry him away with his frail bark! Then, suddenly, 
she discovered an immense continent in the midst of the 
ocean and realized that Prometheus, who had only stolen a 
single spark, was but a clumsy thief. She discovered elec- 
tricity and coal mines ; she learned how to make the steam- 
engine and consequently how to multiply her wealth with 
a rapidity unknown to our ancestors. From that moment 
man was no longer content merely to dream of the prom- 
ised land; he wished to see it for himself. He demolished 
all those traditions, laws and institutions which hampered 
the flight of human energy; he learned to work both hard 
and quickly; he won both liberty and riches and he con- 
ceived the idea of progress. 

The idea of progress was born during the closing years 
of the seventeenth century, at which time man began to 
realize that he was able to conquer the earth and its treas- 
ures. It developed and spread during the nineteenth cen- 
tury, and overcame both the objections of philosophers and 
the misoneism of the masses, the scruples of religion and 



10 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

the spirit of tradition, in proportion as man extended his 
dominion over nature, seized her treasures and shook off 
the yoke of obsolete teaching. The tremendous develop- 
ment of the great American States ensured its final triumph 
and it is today the dominating principle of our civilization 
— one which obliges us to make efforts, to run risks and 
endure privation. And yet ... if you ask people who 
have the word " progress " constantly on their lips what 
they understand by it, how many can give you an exact 
definition? You have only to read the books and articles 
on the subject or to study the proceedings of sociological 
congresses to see how confused and discordant are the 
ideas even of experts. The idea of progress appears to be 
as popular and all powerful as it is vague and incoherent. 
It is on every one's lips, but no one knows exactly what it 
is. Stranger still, in the century of progress you hear 
constant complaints of universal decadence. Workmen, 
employes, soldiers, students, children, parents and servants 
are no better than before ; good cooking is as much a thing 
of the past as good literature, beautiful furniture, and art, 
and courteous manners. How is it that so many things are 
deteriorating in this age of progress ? Are we making prog- 
ress or not? Is the progress of which we are so proud 
and to which we daily sacrifice our leisure and our peace of 
mind, sometimes even our very life, but an illusion after 
all? 

Ill 

It is hardly necessary to point out the seriousness of this 
question, which may be regarded as fundamental, since on 
it depends the final sentence passed upon our civilization: 
whether it is a serious matter or a great delusion. And 
yet our age cannot answer it. Why is this? How is this 



QUANTITY AND QUALITY 11 

apparent contradiction to be explained? This is the great 
problem which all I saw, learned and observed in North 
and South America forced me to face. Has the problem 
of the New World struck me in this light because my start- 
ing point was not only Europe but also the dead and gone 
ages of ancient history? It may be so. At all events this 
obscure problem has always seemed somewhat clearer when 
I compared American, and more especially North Amer- 
ican, society with the ancient civilizations to which I had 
devoted so much study. True, the civilizations from which 
our own is descended were poor: their desires, ambitions, 
their initiative, enterprise and originality were all limited; 
they produced but little and, while they suffered much from 
lack of material resources, they only looked upon the in- 
crease of riches as a painful necessity. They did, however, 
strive after a high standard of perfection in art, literature, 
morals and religion, as is proved by the artistic character of 
almost all the industries of the past, the importance attrib- 
uted to the decorative arts, to questions of personal morals, 
ceremonial and forms. Quality was more highly esteemed 
than quantity, and all the limitations to which these civiliza- 
tions were subject — limitations which seem so strange to 
us today — were but the necessary price of this ardently 
desired perfection. We have made the accumulation of 
riches our aim; we have won liberty and destroyed almost 
all the limitations of the past ; but we have had to abandon 
nearly all the ideals of artistic, religious and moral perfec- 
tion venerated by our ancestors and sacrifice quality to quan- 
tity. 

Take, for example, the dispute as to the study of the 
classics. Why did men study Homer and Cicero with so 
much enthusiasm in times past? Because the great Greek 
and Latin writers were then considered the models of a 



12 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

literary perfection greatly admired by the ruling classes, 
which was not merely an intellectual adornment. It could 
confer public esteem, celebrity, even glory and lofty posi- 
tions. During the last century these models have, how- 
ever, lost much of their prestige, either because many people 
have learnt to appreciate the literature of other ages or 
because they are no longer in touch with a period which 
speaks too much and writes too fast. How can a candidate 
for the Presidency of the United States, who has to make 
ten or fifteen speeches a day, aim at the perfection of ora- 
tory of Cicero or Quintilian? But the day when classic 
learning ceased to be a school of literary taste pronounced 
its doom ; once the ancient writers ceased to be models, their 
works became books like any others, and less interesting to 
many readers than much modern literature. We hear much 
of an artistic crisis. Here we must, however, draw a dis- 
tinction. The arts may be divided into two categories: 
those which merely serve to amuse man and to offer him 
an agreeable pastime, such as music, the drama and, to a 
certain extent, literature; and those which beautify the 
world, such as architecture, sculpture, painting and all the 
decorative arts. Now it is obvious that if there is a crisis 
in every branch of art at the present time, the crisis is far 
more acute in the arts belonging to the latter category. No 
age has spent so much on beautifying the world as our own 
has done; no epoch has given birth to such hosts of archi- 
tects, sculptors, painters and decorators, built so many 
towns, palaces and bridges, or laid out so many parks and 
gardens. Why are we so dissatisfied with the results? 
Why have the Americans, who spent such fabulous sums on 
beautifying their towns, never succeeded in building a S. 
Mark or a Notre Dame ? We have everything : money, art- 
ists and the desire to create the beautiful; what is lacking? 



QUANTITY AND QUALITY 13 

Only one thing : time. One day at New York I was speaking 
in appreciative terms of American architecture to a very tal- 
ented architect. " Yes, yes," he answered sarcastically, " my 
compatriots are quite ready to spend one hundred million 
dollars on building a church as beautiful as S. Mark's in 
Venice, but they would insist on its being finished in 
eighteen months." The reply was suggestive. How is it 
possible to beautify a world which is perpetually being 
transformed, where nothing is stable and where everything, 
from furniture to buildings, must be turned out in quanti- 
ties? Time, reasonable leisure, a wise moderation in the 
demand for quantity and a certain stability of taste are 
indispensable in the construction of beautiful buildings and 
beautiful furniture alike if even a fairly high standard of 
perfection is to be attained. S. Mark and Notre Dame 
cannot be built in eighteen months and France could never 
have produced her great decorative styles if public taste 
had been as changeable as it is now and people had expected 
to refurnish every ten years. 

IV 

How many other instances could be given! If we look 
around us we see on all hands this struggle between quality 
and quantity, which is the very essence of modern civiliza- 
tion. Two worlds are at war in our day ; not, as is so often 
thought, Europe and America, but quantity and quality, and 
their conflicts disturb and rend asunder America just as 
much Europe. The impossibility of defining progress, the 
contradiction between our constant complaints of general 
decadence and our equally constant assertions that the world 
is progressing, are another effect of this struggle. Our age 
has increased the output of certain commodities while lower- 
ing the standard of quality so that it appears to be progress- 



14) EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

ing If we judge it from the standpoint of quantity, and to be 
deteriorating if we judge it from that of quahty. We are 
bewildered, because we are constantly confusing these two 
standards by using sometimes one and sometimes the other. 
Set an architect and a builder in concrete to discuss our 
age: the former will tell you that the multipHcation of 
hideous, jerry built towns and villages is a sign of deca- 
dence and barbarism, because they prove that we have lost 
the power of raising the marvellous monuments which are 
the glory of the Middle Ages; while the latter will main- 
tain with equal sincerity that no epoch has been so progres- 
sive as ours which sees the birth of so many new towns and 
the extension of those already existing. The former 
judges from the standpoint of quality and is right in assert- 
ing that Notre Dame or S. Mark's, Venice, are of greater 
value than a whole American city; the other, who judges 
from the standpoint of quantity, is equally justified in draw- 
ing a directly opposite conclusion. In America I have seen 
an even more striking instance of this tragic misunder- 
standing, which is latent in nearly all our judgments on 
good and evil. When I arrived the campaign which had 
been going on for some years against the trusts, the great 
banks, the railway and insurance companies, was at its 
fiercest. Speeches, articles and books by men of weight 
accused the great financial magnates of being propagators of 
corruption and tools of a modern despotism no less detest- 
able than the despotisms of ancient times, and of forming 
disgraceful organizations to rob honest men of the fruit of 
their toil. This campaign was so widespread among the 
middle and lower classes as to contribute in no small degree 
to the fall of the Republican Party. This wave of popular 
indignation was, however, met in America, as it had been in 
Europe, with absolute composure by economists and busi- 



QUANTITY AND QUALITY 15 

ness men who accused the whole movement of being a 
return to the ideas of the Middle Ages and sang the praises 
of modern finance, its immense enterprises, great successes 
and formidable organizations. How is such a marked dif- 
ference of opinion on a question of such importance to be 
explained in an epoch so enlightened and educated as our 
own? Has part of the world been struck blind and only 
the remainder been gifted with clear vision? Not at all. It 
is not a question of sight or blindness, but of two sets of men 
having different aims and employing different standards of 
measurement How can they possibly come to an under- 
standing? If the quantitative standard be adopted, if it be 
admitted that the aim and object of life is to produce the 
greatest possible quantity of wealth in the shortest possible 
time, the economists are right. The injustices and corrup- 
tions denounced by the adversaries of modern finance are 
but the trifling drawbacks of the economic liberty to which 
the modern world owes its wealth. The idea that the earn- 
ings of the individual should be determined by the blind play 
of economic forces was, however, unknown to all the civil- 
izations preceding our own. They always strove to adjust 
this play of forces, so as to bring it into agreement with 
the principles of charity and justice. In order to attain 
this end, they did not even hesitate to limit the developments 
of industry and commerce, as, for instance, by forbidding 
usury. They subordinated economic development to an 
ideal of moral perfection; quantity to quality. Now, if this 
standard be applied to the modern world, those who disap- 
prove of modern finance are right; certain methods em- 
ployed by modern finance and, in certain cases, even cor- 
ruption, may further the production of riches, but are none 
the less distasteful to a sensitive moral conscience. The 
partisans and opponents of finance may talk for ever, they 



16 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

will never agree, for they start from different standpoints, 
which can never be reconciled. 

We now see why the comparisons made between Europe 
and America, all the discussions as to which of the two 
worlds is the best, can never lead to any definitive con- 
clusion. The weak point of all these comparisons is always 
the confusion of the two standards. America is neither the 
egregious country where no one has an idea beyond money 
making, nor the fabulous land of marvels its admirers would 
have us believe it. It is the country in which the principle 
of quantity, which has become so powerful during the last 
century and a half, has won its most signal triumph. An 
active, energetic, vigorous people found itself in possession 
of an immense territory, of which part was extremely fertile 
and other districts rich in mines and forests, just at the time 
when civilization had discovered the means which rendered 
possible the development of immense tracts of country and 
the rapid production of wealth: the steam engine. This 
people had in its hands a country unhampered by tradition 
and was therefore able to march along the new paths of his- 
tory with unexampled rapidity and energy. In the course of 
a single century it has multiplied its population, its towns 
and its wealth ten, fifteen and even thirty fold. It created 
in hot haste a social order which has subordinated the ideals 
of perfection prevalent hitherto to a new ideal : the ideal of 
increasing size and increasing rapidity. It is not true that 
America is indifferent to intellectual things, but her efforts 
in the field of art and science neither are nor can be subor- 
dinated to the other and higher ideal of the rapid and in- 
tensive development of the continent by means of machinery. 
At the same time it is not correct to assert that Europe 
stands for the essence of civilization, as against American 
barbarism, or that the Old World has seen its day and is 



QUANTITY AND QUALITY 17 

powerless and paralysed by the trammels of routine. The 
ancient societies of Europe have also entered upon what 
might be called the quantitative phase of history ; in Europe, 
too, the masses demand a higher standard of living; public 
and private expenditure is increasing with alarming rapidity 
and it has become absolutely necessary to further the produc- 
tion of wealth. This is, however, a far more difficult matter 
in Europe than in America. Europe is far more densely 
populated; part of the land is exhausted; the many political 
divisions and the multiplicity of tongues greatly increase the 
difficulties of development on a large scale ; the traditions of 
the days when men produced a small number of articles 
which attained a high standard of perfection are more pow- 
erful. Europe is superior to America in the higher things 
of the mind, but in economic enterprises she is slower, more 
timid, less prodigal; in short, more limited, nor could it be 
otherwise. She cannot produce the same quantity at the 
same rate. Europe may thus seem superior to America or 
America to Europe, according to whether we make use of 
the standard of quantity or quality. If the perfection of a 
civilization is to be gauged by its output of riches America 
must be considered the model; if, on the other hand, per- 
pection is to be judged by intellectual activity Europe bears 
off the palm. 

V 

The objection might be urged : " But we cannot live for 
ever in a state of indecision. What standard ought we to 
choose? Is the world, as we see it today, a marvellous 
epic of progress or a gloomy tragedy of decay? Which of 
the two worlds, Europe or America, is the better? Which 
is to be regarded as the model ? You have no right to set 
such problems if you cannot solve them, and if you cannot 



18 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

solve them, you might have saved yourself your journeys 
to America or at all events have spent your time on these 
journeys on other things and refrained from writing a 
lengthy volume on the conflict between the two worlds. " 
Such an objection would be both natural and reasonable. 
It is, however, unlikely that man will ever succeed in solv- 
ing the problem with any degree of certainty during the 
present phase of civilization, for this very uncertainty is the 
price of man's conquest of the earth and of the enormous 
development of America which we ourselves have wit- 
nessed. In order to conquer the earth and its treasures we 
have sacrificed many of the ideals of perfection — artistic, 
moral and religious — bequeathed to us by our ancestors ; 
are we, however, ready to give them up altogether? Can 
we even imagine a world of pure quantity without either 
morals, beauty or justice? The question is its own answer. 
But the pride and cupidity of man have been excited to 
such a pitch by his conquests, that the modern world seems 
to have made up its mind to go on with the great adventure 
to the bitter end. A religious, moral or political movement 
placing reasonable limits to needs and luxury in every class 
seems very unlikely to take place in our day and, so long 
as the population, the demands of all classes, and public 
and private expenditure continue to increase, quantity will 
continue to extend its sway. We shall be forced to subor- 
dinate art and morals to the necessity of manufacturing 
more rapid machinery, bringing more and more land under 
cultivation and discovering mines. The production of 
wealth will tend more and more to become the standard of 
progress and our day will become increasingly the day of 
those who possess vast tracts of territory, great empires, 
and rich coal and iron mines. Fire will once more become, 
as at the dawn of history, the supreme deity, and the intel- 



QUANTITY AND QUALITY 19 

lectual and moral uncertainty in which we live will continue. 
No system of philosophy, no science, will be able to replace 
this uncertainty by a clear and exact knowledge of good and 
evil, beauty and ugliness, truth and error. All the qualita- 
tive differences between things will tend to become confused 
in our minds. We shall not be able to give an exact defini- 
tion of progress, just as we shall find it difficult to dis- 
tinguish between legitimate needs and vices, between reason- 
able expenditure and extravagance. We shall change our 
aesthetic principles every year; we shall consider a thing 
ugly today which we admired yesterday and vice versa, and 
after probing into the mystery of those things before which 
our fathers bowed their heads, we shall end by asking at the 
very moment when science is celebrating its greatest tri- 
umphs whether it is true or false, whether it teaches to know 
reality or merely deludes us; whether we know or are but 
dreaming! Here we have the great problem with which 
contemporary philosophy is confronted. Everything seems 
to totter to its fall around man who, by transcending every 
limit, even the reality of the world, has become too 
powerful ! 

VI 

If there be no way out of the situation, why face it at all, 
you will say? Why recognize the existence of an incurable 
malady? I am of the opinion, however, that it is well to 
analyse our present strange position, one which is unique 
in the history of the world, and that a thorough under- 
standing of it cannot fail to be of service to those men — 
scholars, artists, men of letters, jurists, and the religious 
— who represent the world of quality. With the exception 
of medicine, whose aim is to cure our maladies, of those 
sciences which make discoveries of service to industry, and 



20 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

of the arts which minister to public amusement, the world 
of intellect of today seems out of touch with the world. Is 
there a single earnest priest who has not asked himself in 
moments of discouragement of what use it is to preach the 
Christian virtues to a century whose power lies in overween- 
ing pride and an almost delirious greed of possession? 
What intelligent historian has not wondered from time to 
time to what purpose he persists in recording the events of 
the past to a generation which only looks to the future? 
What philosopher has not felt in this age, so wholly absorbed 
in economic realities, as if he had strayed into this world 
from some other planet? What artist, whose ambition is 
not confined to money making but who strives after a high 
standard of perfection, has not often cursed the frenzied 
whirl in which we all live today? From time to time an 
apparent reversion to the old order takes place; a sudden 
interest is manifested in the progress of religion, the future 
of morals, the history of the past, the problems of meta- 
physics, and the artistic remains of dead civilizations. 
These passing enthusiasms are, however, too transitory to 
convince artists and scholars that they have a definite and 
useful task to accomplish. One reason why all forms of 
intellectual activity tend at the present time to become either 
lucrative professions or bureaucratic careers is that they are 
forced to seek outside — in money or in social position — 
the object which they can no longer find in themselves. 
How many times, during my long journeys across the great, 
lonely tracks of America, have I thought, as I gazed on the 
wheat fields or coffee plantations stretching as far as the 
eye could reach, of the little bits of marble so delicately 
carved by the artists of ancient Greece which are the treas- 
ures of our museums. Was not the marvellous perfection 
of Greek art due to the fact that at a certain period in their 



QUANTITY AND QUALITY 21 

history they ceased to try to extend their dominion over the 
earth and its treasures? Have we not succeeded in con- 
quering these immense stretches of country because we have 
given up striving after the artistic and moral perfection 
which was the glory of the ancients? This idea seemed to 
me to shed fresh light upon the ancient civilizations and our 
own day alike. If the civilizations which carried their de- 
sire for perfection too far ended by exhausting their energies 
in the pursuit of a goal at once too circumscribed and too 
difficult of attainment, are not the civilizations which give 
themselves over to the passion for immensity, speed and 
quantity fated to end in a new, coarse and violent barbarism ? 
If a people is to live happily and work profitably, there must 
be a certain balance between quantity and quality, and this 
balance is only possible if the ideals of perfection, whether 
artistic, moral or religious — are capable of setting a bound 
to the desire for the increase of wealth. How many forms 
of intellectual activity, which are at present neglected or 
despised, or else completely transformed into careers or 
professions, would once more become noble missions if 
artists, historians, philosophers, priests, men of letters and 
the upper classes by whom they are surrounded realized of 
what supreme importance it is to keep intact some sort of 
breakwater against the violent flood of modern progress! 
What renewed energy would these forms of intellectual life 
draw from their consciousness of this task and its impor- 
tance! Take classical studies, for instance, I touch upon 
this point once more, as I draw to a close, because it is one 
about which I thought much during my travels in America 
— classical studies will never flourish again unless, after 
moderating their scientific claims, we restore to them their 
original artistic and literary character. They must, that is 
to say, have as their object the preservation of an ideal of 



n EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

aesthetic perfection. We cannot, however, simply return to 
the humanism of times past. Greece and Rome can no' 
longer be regarded as the one and only standard of beauty. 
Times have changed, the world would no longer tolerate the 
confinement of taste within such narrow bounds. Greece 
and Rome may and should be one of our models, the most 
ancient and the most glorious. The models created by 
Greece and Rome have exercised such immense influence on 
the history of the world, they have so often aided nations 
to emerge from barbarism and to find in limitation the con- 
sciousness of beauty, truth and justice, that it is our duty to 
keep them alive in our minds and ready to come once more 
to our assistance. In order to keep them alive, we must 
have schools where we can learn to know and feel them. 
No ideal of perfection is either absolute, eternal or neces- 
sary; they are one and all born of an arbitrary and hence 
transitory limitation ; they are like so many sparks from the 
infinite light surrounding us. They pass away in an instant 
if man makes no effort to retain them. There have been 
periods which shattered statues and burned books whose 
fragments we treasure as relics and this destruction of an- 
tiquity might conceivably take place again, though under 
less violent forms. What will be the use of filling our 
museums with Greek statues when the world no longer ap- 
preciates their beauty, or of publishing perfect editions of 
the classics when only a handful of specialists can read 
them? Just because in the great continents of America fire 
is once more about to become the lord of the earth and the 
supreme deity of man, as it was at the dawn of history, the 
law of equilibrium demands that in both Europe and Amer- 
ica there should be a select few devoted to the worship of 
the Muses and capable of appreciating the harmonies of 
Virgil even amid the deafening whirl of modern machinery. 



ANARCHY, LIBERTY AND DISCIPLINE 



The European war, which has already devastated so much 
of the world we knew, this war which has been spoken of 
for years, though often without any more real belief in its 
possibihty than in that of the sun being extinguished or the 
earth colliding with some wandering comet, this war took 
but a week to become a grim reality. On the evening of 
July 24th, 1 9 14, Europe from the Baltic to the Ionian, from 
the Pyrenees to the Ural Mountains, went to rest never 
dreaming but that the next day would dawn as usual, bring- 
ing to the world, like its predecessors and successors, its 
wonted burden of good and evil and then vanishing into the 
abyss of time with nought to mark it from its fellows. The 
German Emperor was on his usual summer cruise in the 
North Sea, the Emperor of Austria was taking the waters 
at Ischl, the President of the French Republic was about 
to leave Russia on a visit to the Scandinavian sovereigns. 
But on Saturday, July 25th, all Europe read with dismay 
the threatening words addressed to the Serbian government 
by the Austrian Minister at Belgrade and the following Sat- 
urday, August 1st, Count Pourtales, the German ambassador 
at Petrograd, handed the declaration of war to the Russian 
government. How did this come about ? Whose fault was 
it? What was its object? Even now after three years the 
rapidity with which in one short week the imaginary comet 
appeared, grew and collided with us, the paralysed stupefac- 
tion with which we watched its approach, seem like some 
hideous dream. 

When the time comes, history will investigate and relate 

23 



^ 



24 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

everything that was said, thought and done day by day and 
hour by hour at the courts and in the chancelleries of Europe 
during that fatal week. At present each government 
strives to divulge only that which tends to throw the re- 
sponsibility for this appalling catastrophe on to the shoulders 
of other governments. There is, however, one point as to 
which no impartial observer can be in doubt. The European 
war broke out because and solely because Germany, both 
her people and her government, willed it. The respective 
parts played by people and government matter little. What 
does matter is the fact that at the critical moment people 
and government agreed to fall upon their two powerful 
eastern and western neighbours who asked nothing better 
than to be left in peace. Hence we are faced with the ques- 
tion, why should such an industrious people, professing to 
be actuated by the same moral and political principles as its 
neighbours, a people which therefore had every reason to de- 
sire peace as much as the other peoples of Europe, have 
suddenly been seized by such an overwhelming desire to go 
to war without provocation and in a cause that only con- 
cerned them indirectly? Does this people despite appear- 
ances differ from its neighbours ? Is it in reality a stranger 
in that Europe in the very heart of which it dwells and 
multiplies ? 

If we are to answer this question aright we must bear in 
mind that this war is not merely a war but, like the fall of 
the Western Empire, the advent of Christianity, and the 
French Revolution, an historic cataclysm. Hence if the 
accidents which immediately brought it about are of recent 
origin, its real underlying causes must be sought in the re- 
mote past; they date back to that immense upheaval of which 
the French Revolution itself was but an episode, that up- 
heaval which for two centuries has been undermining the 



ANARCHY, LIBERTY AND DISCIPLINE 25 

principles on which the social order had rested since the 
beginning of history. 

Bygone centuries had said to Man, every new thing, just 
because it is new, must be regarded as worse than its prede- 
cessors, and consequently every old thing must be held 
sacred. One century, the nineteenth, ventured to reverse 
this principle and to proclaim in the name of progress that 
the new, just because it was new, should be preferred to 
that which was already in existence and that it was the duty 
of each generation to give new lamps for old as frequently 
as possible. The bygone centuries had told Man that mod- 
eration of desire, simplicity of life and frugality were the 
supreme virtues. The nineteenth century reversed this be- 
lief also, deeming it a virtue to earn and spend lavishly and 
to multiply its desires, needs and aspirations. For cen- 
turies and centuries Man had been told that he was bom into 
the world in order to submit to authority both human and 
divine ; the nineteenth century proclaimed, on the contrary, 
that he was born in order to live in liberty and to exercise 
his faculties freely and that, in consequence, it was his duty 
to inquire into the reasons for the authority to which he 
was asked to submit. This was perforce the result of that 
great movement of peoples, classes, ideas and aspirations 
which after the discovery of America impelled Europe first, 
and then both Europe and America to conquer the earth, 
that reversal of principles by which what was bad has either 
become or was in process of becoming good, and what was 
good either has become or is in process of becoming bad, 
inevitably engendering universal unrest in the life of the 
world, an unrest far more widespread than that caused by 
Christianity, which had also, though by another process, re- 
versed so many of the social principles of the ancients, an 
unrest whose causes escape most observers, but is none the 



26 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

less making itself felt everywhere in the world today. 
Whether the new principles of liberty and progress can 
ever succeed in uprooting and suppressing wholly and for 
ever the ancient principle of authority and tradition, or 
whether a longer time than has yet elapsed is requisite for 
its uprooting and annihilation, the fact remains that in 
nearly every European country the new principle has only 
achieved a partial triumph and the old principle still holds 
partial sway. Consequently in all modern European coun- 
tries we find a lack of internal harmony which is both 
disturbing and constant, but varies in degree, since authority 
and tradition have not yet yielded or been forced to yield 
to the same extent all over Europe. One nation is con- 
servative and clings to tradition in those very things in 
which another is striving eagerly after progress, innovation 
and vice versa. 

II 

If from this point of view we compare the three principal 
European Powers we shall perhaps understand why France 
and England desired peace and why Germany on the con- 
trary forced war upon them as she has forced it on the whole 
world. To the great upheaval of ideas and principles which 
brought forth modern civilization France contributed her 
share, and what a share! the Revolution. To the prin- 
ciple of authority, which for so many centuries held sway 
in every State, the French Revolution opposed the principle 
of liberty. For this reason France is undoubtedly the 
European nation in which the new principle of liberty has 
succeeded in establishing its ascendancy in politics to a 
greater extent than in any other country and is perhaps the 
only one in which the State, stripped of its outward show, 
the mystic pomp and ceremony of bygone ages, is revealed 



ANARCHY, LIBERTY AND DISCIPLINE 9.1 

to man in its naked reality as a creation of reason pure and 
simple, intended for the service of those who are subject 
to it and in which authority instead of coming from above 
emanates from those who are bound to obey it. Thus un- 
trammelled public opinion holds absolute sway over the Re- 
public, a state of things of w^hich the bare suggestion would 
have seemed mad or impious three centuries ago. But 
apart from the State and political doctrines there is perhaps 
no nation in Europe in which the ancient spirit, respect for 
tradition, sense of moderation and recognition of authority 
is as strong as in France. Many look on France as behind 
the times because in that country old traditions hold their 
own more successfully against the encroachments of mod- 
ernism than they succeed in doing elsewhere, always pro- 
vided that it is not a question of political theories. Even 
the rich live modestly and simply, at least in proportion to 
their ample means; they practise economy, a virtue which 
has fallen into disuse; they are slow to change the sacred 
habits of everyday life, and family feehng is very strong in 
them. The mania for novelty in philosophy, art and science 
is not widespread, as among the cultured classes of other 
countries. After the Revolution France, and this is by no 
means the least of her merits, did not give birth to many 
fresh systems of philosophy or wax enthusiastic over those 
brought forth in such numbers by Germany. Today France 
is perhaps the only nation which does not demand novelty 
in art at any cost or refuse to recognize the authority of 
the old criteria. 

It is not difficult to understand that a rich, powerful, and 
highly educated people endowed with a sense of moderation, 
and not easily deceived by specious theories into a craving 
after the impossible, a nation in which pubic opinion rules 
the State, would naturally desire peace. France was con- 



28 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

tented with her lot and did not hanker for the impossible. 
Why should she expose her fertile fields to the terrible 
scourge of war? The masses when they can follow their 
natural inclinations prefer peace to war. France has so 
earnestly desired peace that more than one of her neigh- 
bours, perhaps the enemy himself, had concluded that she 
had become effeminate. 

When we pass to England we find another contradiction. 
England too had played her part in the recent upheaval of 
the world. The industrial revolution, without which the 
political revolution would have had much less effect on the 
old order of things, was pre-eminently her work. When 
man possessed only such instruments, mostly of wood, as 
could be set in motion by his own hand, or by the muscles 
of some domestic animal, he was able, it is true, to make 
beautiful objects, but only in limited numbers, and was 
therefore forced to look upon parsimony as a virtue and on 
prodigality as a vice. When, however, man succeeded in 
inventing machinery set in motion by steam, and in manu- 
facturing an unlimited number of objects, though possibly 
of inferior quality, he no longer sought after beauty and 
good workmanship, but after quantity and variety. Other- 
wise what was the use of turning out so many? The more 
rapidly man worked, the more he multiplied his needs, the 
more perfect was he considered. 

England, having inaugurated the industrial revolution, 
was bound to do as she has done and bring into discredit 
patriarchal habits, family traditions, simplicity and economy 
more than any other nation. It is a well known fact that in 
private life the Englishman, who is a sort of Bohemian, 
bound by no close ties to his environment, will leave his 
home, his family and change his whole manner of living 
in obedience to the exigencies of his work. But this ap- 



ANARCHY, LIBERTY AND DISCIPLINE 29 

parent instability rests on an unshakable foundation of po- 
litical and intellectual traditions. There are no people more 
slow to change its opinions, methods, principles, tastes and 
convictions in matters of art, science, religion, philosophy 
and, even to a certain extent, in politics. The Germans 
accuse England of having desired and provoked the war, 
wherein they show great ingratitude towards the nation 
which has done everything in its power to make it easy for 
them to make a surprise attack on Europe. Not only did 
England not desire the war, but she did not even believe it 
to be a possibility, in spite of the repeated warnings of far- 
sighted men, for she had never beheld such a cyclone and 
war would have been too disturbing to both her business 
and her pleasure. Consequently she had made no prepara- 
tions for war; she had neither Alhes, army nor funds; she 
hesitated up to the last moment, up to the moment when 
the German soldiers had crossed the Belgian frontier, and 
for many months after the outbreak of the conflict she 
failed to realize the magnitude of the ordeal before her. 

In Germany too we find a contradiction, different again 
from that observed in France and England. Every one 
knows the power still possessed by the mystic principle of 
authority in Germany even in the twentieth century. God 
still governs the Germans, who are consequently under the 
impression that they are the apple of His eye. We con- 
stantly hear it said that Germany is a survival of the Middle 
Ages. This is false if we judge by the forms of govern- 
ment which wear a modern dress, but true if we judge by 
their spirit. Where except in Germany could we find wor- 
ship of royal power and of all authority emanating from the 
State, the spirit of the seventeenth century transported to 
the twentieth, become more fervid and sincere because 
it is tempered by a certain spirit of liberty and criti- 



aO EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

cism, more universal and imperative because it is taught and 
inculcated by an admirably organized and omnipresent 
State? The absolute monarchies which existed before the 
Revolution were much more venerated than actually obeyed, 
as is the case today with the authority of the State in Russia 
and Turkey. In Germany, by applying forcibly and with 
modern methods the old principles of monarchial rule, the 
State has succeeded in making itself respected and obeyed 
to such an extent that at the outbreak of war the German 
State was undoubtedly the strongest in Europe, the one that 
had least reason to fear the opposition, ill will and indiffer- 
ence of its subjects. 

But what anarchy in customs, tastes, aspirations, criteria 
and ideas counterbalance this power of the State in modern 
Germany ! There is no people among whom the old tradi- 
tions of simplicity and frugality have given place to a 
more frantic craving for riches and luxury. No other 
nation has placed the duty of earning and spending, working 
and enjoying up to the very last moment, on a level with the 
heroic virtues. No other nation has prided itself to such a 
degree on setting aside, both in theory and practice, the 
bounds respected by man throughout the ages, and this ap- 
plies not merely to the bounds set by tradition and authority 
but also to those dictated by common sense, ethical law and 
decency. We have all heard ad nauseam of German kultur, 
that system of science and philosophy which since the French 
Revolution has found so many followers among both 
adolescent and decadent nations, and of which unfortunately 
the Italian universities of the present day are the most ser- 
vile worshippers in Europe. But wherein does this kultur 
differ from earlier or co-existent systems of learning? 
Herein, that too often through arrogance, lack of experi- 
ence, or some similar defect, it wholly fails to ciistinguish 



ANARCHY, LIBERTY AND DISCIPLINE 31 

the point at which it must stop short in research, because if 
it attempts to transcend that point it is thrown back upon 
itself and hurled into the sophistic void. Many even now 
raise their eyes to Heaven and exclaim, " Who would have 
thought it of Germany? Who would have imagined that 
she was capable of such deeds, that she could set such an 
example ? A country with so many philosophers and schol^ 
ars, a country so full of education and learning. " But do 
you really believe, with scholars and philosophers, that wis- 
dom and science are incorruptible possessions, the very es- 
sence of progress, a ray of that divine light which purifies, 
revivifies and sheds joy wherever it shines? No, even sci- 
ence and wisdom, the works of man, are subject to all the 
perversions and corruptions of humanity ; they too may err 
and lose their way, more especially if they claim to transcend 
certain bounds of knowledge, which are never laid down by 
science herself but by humility, common sense, and by what 
I might term a certain " human instinct " which the scholar 
ought to possess both with regard to himself and exterior 
things. This " human instinct " is, however, just what is 
lacking in German kiiltur. Impelled by frenzied pride to 
seek its starting point in itself alone, eager to set up fresh 
systems of morals, art, religion and philosophy, the German 
intellect has for the last century been accomplishing Her- 
culean labours, with the result that it has too often succeeded 
but only in complicating simple questions, obscuring simple 
issues, setting insoluble problems, clouding the moral con- 
science and ruining the artistic taste of the world. 

Ill 

How many examples I could give ! I will, however, name 
but one, taken from the branch of study with which I am 



32 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

most familiar — an example which will hardly appear cred- 
ible when man has succeeded in freeing himself from this 
malady — the Homeric problem. The Iliad and the Odys- 
sey are, as every one knows, the two great monuments of 
poetry which stand on either side of the portals of history. 
They mark the starting point of European literature. It 
is therefore not surprising that in every age they have been 
subjects for diligent study and research. But however 
great the liberties critics have been in the habit of taking 
in their interpretation and comments upon the masterpieces 
of long dead writers, they had for centuries respected at 
least two boundary lines when treating of these two vener- 
able pillars of literature. One of these lines of demarcation 
was the tradition according to which in the eighth century 
B. C. a poet had flourished, named Homer, who had written 
two poems and of whose life a more or less accurate ac- 
count was given. Although this tradition was defective 
and incomplete and its details did not agree, it had been 
respected for centuries, simply because it was recognized 
that the ancients were more likely than ourselves to know 
when and by whom the Iliad and the Odyssey were written, 
and that even if they had forgotten the name of the real 
author it was hardly likely that we should succeed in re- 
calling it. The other limit was still more modest, since it 
was set up by the common sense which says that, just as 
every son must of necessity have a father, every book must 
have an author, and that if every book we possess was 
wTitten by some poor devil who one fine day took it into his 
head to dip his pen into ink and sit down to write the first 
word of his book, not giving up his task until he had written 
Finis on the last page, the Iliad and the Odyssey must have 
been written in the same way. While tradition and these 
considerations of common sense did not of course satisfy 



ANARCHY, LIBERTY AND DISCIPLINE 33 

our thirst for knowledge, they were for centuries regarded 
as the pillars of Hercules, beyond which curiosity did not 
venture to pass until German learning appeared upon the 
scenes. German scholarship knew no such hesitation, and 
the inevitable punishment followed, for instead of drawing 
fresh vigour from this living source of poetry German 
savants racked their brains over the impossible task of trying 
to reconstruct the history of a work about which we possess 
no data. They discussed and waxed hot over the wildest of 
theories ; they studied and wrote much without reaching any 
conclusion, until one fine day some wiseacre laid his clumsy 
hands on the immortal masterpiece and pulled it to pieces 
in order to reconstruct out of the fragments the Ur-Ilias, 
the true Iliad, " made in Germany. " 

IV 

We might cite other examples from Roman history in 
which the extraordinary theories of German critics have 
even been improved upon by admiring Italians, as also from 
other branches of learning, had we time to go thoroughly 
into all departments of German kultur. In short, this kultur 
fails to recognize legitimate bounds and is consequently lack- 
ing in order and discipline; it cannot distinguish degrees of 
importance and consequently makes the most grotesque mis- 
takes. It is at the same time arrogant and absurdly naif, 
and has in consequence brought about untold confusion in 
every country, and more particularly in Italy, which failed 
to distinguish between sound and harmful principles. The 
real cause of the war must be sought in the want of balance 
which makes it possible for the strictest political discipline 
to exist side by side with an utter lack of intellectual dis- 
cipline in the same mid-European nation. This disparity 



34 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

between the intellectual anarchy and the political discipline 
of Germany has given birth to the cyclone which is devas- 
tating Europe. How and why it is not difficult to under- 
stand. Theories are powerless to hold the passions in 
check, unless they are fused into a system and rest upon 
some solid foundation, some tradition, authority or recog- 
nized principle, of which the truth is felt and respected by 
the world at large. If these bases and supports are lacking, 
if thought insists upon being, as it were, its own jumping 
off place and on formulating afresh each day the axioms 
from which it proposes to start on its task of reconstructing 
the world from top to bottom, beauty, truth and morals will 
necessarily cease to be anything but a noisy game of soph- 
isms in which each player, by an arbitrary change of prin- 
ciples, is at liberty to uphold the most contradictory theories 
— a game in which the final victory is won by those theories 
which are most flattering to the dominant passions. Ideas 
will not act as brakes, but rather as spurs to the ruling 
passions. This has been the work of literature and philos- 
ophy in every epoch of intellectual anarchy; this is what has 
been accomplished in Germany during the last four decades 
by history, philosophy and literature — the so-called political 
sciences — in proportion as pride in victory and power was 
fostered by the growth of the population and by the new 
wealth so easily obtained from a soil rich in coal and iron. 
German kultur, science, philosophy and literature, which 
were weak because they were unfettered, and regulated 
neither by principles, traditions or authority of any kind 
and, therefore, in their turn powerless to exercise any intel- 
lectual authority, had placed themselves at the service of 
those passions, whether good or bad, which they were un- 
able to correct or hold in check, such as patriotism, the spirit 
of discipline and unity, respect for the sovereign and the 



ANARCHY, LIBERTY AND DISCIPLINE 35 

State, cupidity, national vanity and arrogance and what is 
barbarously called " arrivisme. " These sciences thus en- 
couraged and accentuated all the tendencies of public opin- 
ion, entirely failing to distinguish between the good and 
the bad, the beneficial and the dangerous. Above all, they 
stimulated the mania for confounding the great with the 
merely colossal, quantity with quality, and for regarding the 
German people as the salt of the earth and the model for 
all the world to copy. They inflamed the pride of the 
masses and added fuel to that craze for persecution which 
is always the inseparable companion and the immediate 
chastisement of overbearing pride, with the result that we 
have seen re-enacted in central Europe the terrible tragedy of 
Nineveh and Babylon. We behold the appalling phenome- 
non of not merely a king but a whole nation growing in 
wealth, power and prestige to such a degree as to call forth 
the half fearful admiration of all Europe and America, but 
becoming at the same time more and more restless, discon- 
tented, suspicious and querulously complaining that the 
other nations fail to pay it due respect, that its power is not 
feared as it should be, that its merits are unrecognized and 
its possessions threatened on every hand by disloyal and 
envious enemies. Then one fine day this strange people, 
at the zenith of its power and riches, this people living in 
a Europe which shudders at the very idea of seeing the 
sword of 1870 once more unsheathed, this people which 
alone in Europe could have enjoyed the blessings of peace 
in perfect safety, since it was feared by all while fearing 
none, this people suddenly threw down its gauntlet to the 
world apropos of a question which in no way concerned it 
and challenged five countries, including the three greatest 
Powers, to a life and death combat, and after this mad 
challenge set forth to battle and death at its Emperor's com- 



36 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

mand, as one man, in meek submission to a State which, 
unfortunately for the world, exercises far too much author- 
ity over its subjects. The European war would not have 
broken out had the German people been wiser or the govern- 
ment weaker. The catastrophe was brought about by polit- 
ical discipline and intellectual disorder. Thus a govern- 
ment which was strong, respected and well tempered against 
the blows of fate, served by intelligent men and provided 
with both money and means, has become the tool of the most 
unbridled imagination and ambition in an enterprise in which 
the most the German people can hope is that it may make its 
fall memorable throughout the ages by dragging down the 
whole world with it into the abyss and by burying the 
power, which it had sacrificed in a moment of madness, 
beneath the debris of a civilization which was prosperous 
and flourishing only three short years ago, but whose state 
in another year or two no man can foretell. 

V 

No other end to the tragedy seems within the bounds of 
possibility. The future is of course on the knees of the 
gods and no one would venture to predict how or when a 
settlement will be reached; on the other hand, no one en- 
dowed with any historic sense can fail to see that the Ger- 
mans, at all events at this stage of their history, are lacking 
in the spiritual and intellectual qualities requisite for the 
foundation of great and powerful Empires. A durable 
Empire cannot be built up upon valour, unity, passionate 
or even fanatic love of country alone; common sense, a 
clear intuition of what is or what is not possible, and a sense 
of proportion are equally essential, and in these qualities the 
modern German is conspicuously lacking. Indeed, unless 



ANARCHY, LIBERTY AND DISCIPLINE 37 

some unforeseen miracle were to take place, there can be 
no doubt as to the issue. Both sides being equally tenacious, 
the victory will fall to the one who has the largest means 
at his disposal and knows how to make the best use of them. 
Hence the war will be won by that coalition which can put 
the largest number of men into the field, whose purse is 
longest, which rules the seas and numbers among its mem- 
bers two peoples at least, the French and the British, en- 
dowed with that political sense, that sense of proportion, 
which alone in a war like the present conflict is worth an 
army corps. Do not let us lay too much stress upon the 
fact that the Germans are fighting on foreign soil. Na- 
poleon was in the habit of saying that in war nothing has 
been accomplished until everything has been accomplished, 
a fact proved by his own experience in 1812. The disaster 
of 1 81 2 did not take place at Lodz or on the Narev, but 
when he had reached Moscow itself. 

VI 

Moreover, even were the military situation less favourable 
than is actually the case, we should be forced to believe that 
the war could have no other end. It might even be said 
that it is essential that it should end thus, if Europe is one 
day to enjoy a long peace, untroubled by continual panics 
and unmenaced by obscure ambitions. Do not let us deceive 
ourselves — Europe will never enjoy such a peace if the 
German spirit is permitted to continue to play, what for the 
last century has appeared to be its special role in the world 
— to play it, moreover, more brutally, intoxicated as it 
would be with the fumes of victory. It cannot be denied 
that the German people possesses various great qualities; 
neither, however, can we deny that it has frequently made 



38 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

use of these qualities in a way most dangerous to its neigh- 
bours by borrowing from its neighbours certain principles 
of civilization originated by them and then exaggerating 
them to such a degree as to turn them into perils. Take mili- 
tary service, for instance. The duty of each citizen to bear 
arms for his country was a principle of the ancients which 
the French Revolution had revived and applied with wisdom 
and discretion. But the Germans, by reducing the term of 
service and increasing the number of soldiers as much as 
possible, created and forced upon Europe the modern army, 
which is nothing more or less than the nation in arms, the 
enormous, slow and costly army which has made war a 
calamity in comparison with which all the other scourges 
which have afflicted mankind have been nothing more than 
trifling annoyances. Modern industry, as we have already 
seen, aims at increasing quantity to the detriment of quality. 
At the same time France and Great Britain had applied this 
principle in moderation. Germany arrives upon the scenes 
and what does she proceed to do? What are the shoddy 
goods made in Germany of which we hear so much but the 
exaggeration of this principle? Germany put it into prac- 
tice to such an extent as to flood the world with all sorts of 
inferior imitations. No social order can exist without the 
use of a certain amount of force. Force is therefore up to 
a certain point a factor for good and an element making for 
progress. Every nation and every era has recognized this 
principle, which has only been rejected by a few dreamers. 
But from this elementary, simple and vital truth, the Ger- 
mans have contrived to extract the theories of Clausewitz, 
Nietzsche, and Bernhardi, and the arbitrary maxims of Bis- 
marck, the evil genius of European statesmen for the last 
forty years, and even the European war with its carnage, 
destruction by fire, devastation and deliberate purpose of 



ANARCHY, LIBERTY AND DISCIPLINE 39 

recognizing no law or criteria of conduct in war. Things 
have gone too far. Europe must once more be ruled by 
more mature, older and better balanced peoples. Many are 
of opinion that the war will continue some time longer, that 
a Peace Congress will then be held and a treaty signed, after 
which we shall take up life where we left it that fatal morn- 
ing of July 25, 1914, on which we read Austria's threat to 
Serbia. This is, alas, an illusion. When peace has been 
restored and we try to take up once more the life we led 
before the war, we shall see that the river of history disap- 
peared that day into an abyss, to reappear changed in both 
appearance and direction. We shall not be able to go back. 
Too many things will have changed irrevocably or will have 
to be reconstructed on a new plan if all these rivers of blood 
are not to have flowed in vain and this catastrophe is not 
to be the beginning of a new and better order of things but 
rather of a ruin still more terrible than that on which we 
are gazing today. These things cannot be reconstructed, 
this ruin cannot be avoided, unless Europe returns in thought 
and deed to that moderation which she had lost during the 
last fifty years. This is the test awaiting our generation — 
the test which will show us what we are capable of doing 
for the true progress of the world. 



THE GREAT AND THE COLOSSAL 

At the present time, when the future looms before us like 
some unknown pathless wilderness, it is well to glance from 
time to time at the past and to recall the links of language, 
culture, manners and customs binding us to that brilliant 
civilization which migrated from its Greek birthplace into 
Italy and thence in a Latinized form spread over the greater 
part of Europe, where it still holds sway. If we would 
draw strength from the past to enable us to fulfil our pres- 
ent duties the time has come for us to recall the most striking 
characteristics of the golden age of Latin civilization, its 
heroic striving after the great and its detestation of the 
merely colossal. 

If we wander among the columns of an Egyptian temple, 
or the ruins of the immense Persian, Babylonian or As- 
syrian buildings, the Parthenon, the Temple of Concord at 
Girgenti and the other masterpieces of Greek architecture 
will seem small and insignificant compared to the colossal 
edifices, gigantic columns, and enormous blocks of stone in 
which Oriental pride delighted. Look at the Iliad and the 
Odyssey, they are but small volumes compared with the 
Epics of the East, interminable poems, such as the Ram- 
mayana and the Shah Nameh. Each of the four Gospels 
contains a collection of the words and deeds of Jesus, but 
compare one of them with the discourses of Buddha. A 
few pages were enough to set forth a doctrine destined to 
revolutionize the world, whilst volumes of perfectly ap- 
palling dimensions were needed in the far East to found a 
new religion. The East stands for bulk, weight, repetition 
and prolixity; Greeks for proportion, harmony, grace, 

40 



THE GREAT AND THE COLOSSAL 41 

lucidity and concision. The East strove after the colossal, 
Greece after the great. 

The difference between the colossal and the great is both 
intellectual and moral. The great is an effort to attain an 
ideal creation by the mind of man and to conquer an essen- 
tially spiritual difficulty whose law is within ourselves. The 
colossal is an effort to triumph over matter and over the 
difficulties presented by matter to our will or our caprices 
— or, in other words — over exterior obstacles. To quote 
a great French philosopher, the great is pure quality, where- 
as the colossal is quality with a large admixture of quantity. 
Stern intellectual discipline and humility are absolutely es- 
sential, not only for the creation of the great in every 
sphere, but also for its right understanding and apprecia- 
tion, since an ideal of perfection must be accepted as law. 
The colossal, on the contrary, is one of the myriad forms 
of human vanity and is readily understood and admired even 
by minds of coarser fibre, wholly devoid of education. 

Hence it is not surprising that even Greece and Rome 
after having achieved the truly great, during the most bril- 
liant periods of their history, relapsed into the craze for the 
colossal. Go to Girgenti and close to the Temple of Con- 
cord, which is at once so small and so great, whose incom- 
parable beauty may be called pure quality, you will see the 
remains of a colossal Temple, the ruins of columns which 
still evoke cries of amazement from barbarians from every 
part of the world. The same thing is even more noticeable 
in Rome. Compare the remains of the Mausoleum of 
Augustus and the Mausoleum of Hadrian, the Pantheon of 
Agrippa and the Baths of Caracalla, the latter again with 
the Baths of Diocletian, and you will see that the proportions 
of the buildings increase and become more and more gigantic 
with the march of the centuries. Here too the buildings 



42 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

teach us, in letters of brick and stone, the history of thought 
and feeling. For many a long day Rome had been but a 
modest power, she distrusted fortune, she dreaded wealth 
and luxury and often shrank from circumstances which 
urged her to extend her Empire. Her aim was to found a 
great Empire, not a colossal one like those of which the con- 
querors of the East were so proud. Ruled as she was by 
a chosen few possessed of sufficient authority to direct, not 
merely her policy, but also her public taste, Rome during 
this period succeeded in understanding and sometimes even 
in copying in both art and literature those epochs in which 
Greece had attained true greatness. Wealth, success and 
security gradually changed the Roman soul; those who for 
centuries had guided public taste passed away, Oriental 
civilizations took possession of the mind of the masses when 
they were left to their own devices. The Empire fell a prey 
to unbridled vanity and to a craving for pleasure and ex- 
citement, and with this vanity and craving there set in the 
mania for the colossal. 

How many similar examples are to be seen in the history 
of all the Latin nations, in Spain, France and Italy. 

Take Venice, go down to the Grand Canal and compare 
the modest dimensions of the palaces built by the makers 
of the Republic with those of more recent date, constructed 
by the generations who light-heartedly contributed to her 
decay. Since the days of ancient Greece, life has been one 
perpetual struggle between the principles of the great and 
the colossal. It is most obvious in the decorative arts in 
which it is of symbolic value, but may also be traced in 
literature, war and politics, commerce and industry. Al- 
ways and everywhere there have been and will be men, 
peoples and epochs which have chosen or will choose to 
create the great, and others which have chosen or will choose 



THE GREAT AND THE COLOSSAL 43 

the colossal. Let us look around ; is not this the key to the 
present tremendous crisis in the history of the world? 

When the present generation has passed away and with 
it the passion of feeling that now runs so high, when his- 
torians come to study the history of the European war from 
the archives of the past, just as geologists study the phenom- 
ena of a volcanic eruption by driving their pickaxes into 
the cold lava, they will find the whole cataclysm difficult 
to understand. " Why, " they will ask, " should a rich, 
prosperous people, at the zenith of its power have risked 
everything by provoking a wholly needless war with the 
three greatest European powers? A war which ended by 
arraying practically the whole civilized world against it." 

Here in a few words we have the riddle which is per- 
plexing many troubled minds today. Greece and Rome 
however should be able to supply the answer and enable us 
to read aright the mystery of this people and of its challenge 
to the world. 

This nation, more than any other European nation, has 
been carried away by its passion for the colossal — a passion 
which it must be remembered is but a somewhat coarse form 
of vanity, for the ultimate cause of this appalling catas- 
trophe is to be found in the overweening vanity of a 
nation — a vanity which is characteristic of our century. 
Paris, that intellectual capital of the world, whose finger is 
on the pulse of civilization and its supreme problems, asked 
herself, when confronted by the terrible outbreak of violence 
which is devastating Europe, whether man, as he grows 
richer, more learned and more powerful, does not also tend 
to deteriorate morally. 

It cannot, however, be questioned that our epoch has 
made great strides in moral education. Our civilization, 
which for two centuries has been engaged in a great strug- 



44? EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

gle with nature for the possession of her treasures and 
forces, has been successful in vanquishing the vices and 
inculcating the virtues v^^hich could hamper further these 
efforts. It has, above all, fought against idleness and taught 
men that accuracy, punctuality, zeal in the discharge of 
duty, the spirit of solidarity in groups great and small which 
have to work together. That cohesion of which the bel- 
ligerent nations afford such striking examples today show 
to how great an extent this spirit has spread among the 
masses. No such phenomenon has been seen in any other 
age — a proof that our epoch has made for moral progress. 
How, then, does it come about that this very epoch has been 
overwhelmed by this barbarous mania for destruction and 
violence? The explanation is that in its absorption in the 
task of turning out disciplined workers it has forgotten that 
other passions left unchecked may modify the moral sense 
of the masses; this applies especially to vanity, of which 
the mania for the colossal is one of the most monstrous 
forms. In the early days of the struggle between nature 
and civilization, civilization created great things in great 
humility. With the increase of wealth, success and power, 
however, civilization fell a prey to vanity and aimed at 
creating the colossal for which the necessary means were 
unfortunately forthcoming. The Empires of antiquity were 
filled with pride when they succeeded in raising some monu- 
ment of brick or stone or proportions hitherto unheard of. 
But what were their cities, armies, fleets and buildings in 
comparison to those of the present day? What were their 
industry and commerce in comparison to ours? During 
the last fifty years the mania for the colossal has infected 
all the nations of Europe and America to a greater or lesser 
extent and, unfortunately, one of these nations has been 
completely carried away by it. Nature seems to have en- 



THE GREAT AND THE COLOSSAL 45 

dowed this people with an unbounded energy which makes 
it readily lean to excess. Although during the last century 
it has produced many philologists and archeologists, it has 
never really come under the influence of Latin culture. 
That sense of proportion, that sense of moderation and 
that lucidity, which are the essential characteristics of Latin 
culture, have always repelled it; it has at bottom a sort 
of spurious and apparently invincible mysticism which 
drives it to seek the infinite in the vague, the confused and 
the indefinite. It has been victorious in two wars, it was 
rich in iron and coal, an inestimable advantage in a century 
in which iron has ceased to be the servant of man and has 
become the master of the world. In short, this nation ended 
by regarding itself as the chosen people, the salt of the 
earth, the model for the whole world, and by using the word 
" colossal " to express the highest degree of perfection. It 
was, however, not long before it became as insatiable, rest- 
less, suspicious and jealous as all those eaten up by vanity 
who cherish dreams of the colossal. How, indeed, could 
a people or a period, whose one and only aim was to " go 
one better " in everything than any other people or period, 
be either happy or content? One can only hope for happi- 
ness when one is making for a definite goal which may be 
attained. A people and a period which aim at the creation 
of the colossal are doomed to overshoot the mark, to wander 
aimlessly until they commit some irreparable folly. Hence 
all civilizations, which have striven after the colossal, after 
living in a perpetual state of restlessness, have been over- 
whelmed by some sudden catastrophe — a fact which makes 
us wonder whether we are destined to be the spectators of 
another such tragedy. 

If this indeed be the obscure purpose of history, what 
light is shed upon the sacrifice which fate is exacting from 



46 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

the Allied peoples? Let us never forget that only ordeals 
which put its vitality to a test can enable a nation to keep 
alive the principles of civihzation which it has created or 
inherited. Our ancestors created many great things. They 
built the Pantheon, the Parthenon, Venice and Versailles; 
they created the Empire and the Church, the law, the philos- 
ophy and the decorative arts of the eighteenth century; they 
brought about the Revolution. What value did we place 
upon these things? The sense of greatness, which is the very 
essence of Latin culture, was choked by the Asiatic mania 
for the colossal; quantity triumphed over quality; progress 
— the worth of nations — was gauged solely by the growing 
figures of statistics. France offered more resistance to this 
current of thought than any other country, but for that very 
reason it was too often said that she was aging. Because 
her commerce and population was not increasing at the 
same rate as the population and commerce of Germany she 
ought to have vanished off the face of the earth. How 
could any system of philosophy, any doctrine, any argu- 
ment, go against this formidable current of opinions, senti- 
ments and interests (for many powerful interests were 
mingled in this current) which was carrying every nation 
and every class towards the hideous enormities of a purely 
quantitative civilization? The task could only be accom- 
plished by one of those great historic events which can 
change public opinion; one of those ordeals which suddenly 
reveal the respective value of the principles held by two 
different communities. The ordeal on this occasion is so 
terrible that no man with any heart would ever have dared 
to predict it. But since fate has so willed it. . . . Well, 
let us try to rise above death and ruins to the height of the 
great events which are taking place before our eyes and to 
draw thence the courage, firmness and resignation of which 



THE GREAT AND THE COLOSSAL 47 

we stand in need. A shudder of anguish ran through the 
civiHzed world during the early weeks of the war. It would 
be idle to deny that there were many doubters, many to 
whom it seemed that nothing could check and turn back the 
colossal mass of men and iron which, carrying all before it, 
was marching upon France — that country whose frail and 
ancient civilization seemed on the point of dying out. And 
in this hour of supreme anxiety the whole world turned its 
eyes towards the distant north in the hope of salvation. 
Then suddenly, just when the world was beginning to de- 
spair, this colossal mass hurled itself against some invisible 
obstacle which arose as if by miracle, is checked and re- 
treats. We probably lived through one of the great mo- 
ments of history, for it was then that our generation, in its 
amazement, began to ask itself whether perhaps after all 
mass and numbers were not everything. And from that 
moment the half-conscious travail of our souls began. We 
cannot yet say what this travail will bring forth. The great 
ordeal is not yet over. But just as we cannot doubt that 
the world in which we shall spend the rest of our lives will 
be very different from the world we have hitherto known, 
so we may hope that civilization may once again avert a ca- 
tastrophe which seemed inevitable. The cruel bloodshed and 
anguish of the past years must not have been endured in vain. 
This war must be the final victory of true intellectual and 
moral greatness over the mania for the colossal which had 
hardened and blinded the mind of man; it must restore to 
the world the power to appreciate in every sphere that which 
is great solely by reason of the smallness of its proportions 
and its humility, a greatness which is wholly from within ; 
it must once more raise up generations which can accom- 
plish great things simply and humbly and a world which 
shall recover its moral equilibrium in the sense of true great- 



48 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

ness. It would be rash to assert that there will never be 
another war, but if other great wars should take place it is 
our duty towards the world and ourselves to do everything 
in our power to ensure that never again shall mankind have 
to face another war such as that forced on us by the vota- 
ries of the colossal. 



CHAPTER II 
Teutonism and Latinism 



TEUTONISM AND LATINISM 

I 

Almost the whole civilization of Europe and of America, 
in its essential elements, has been created, on the shore of 
the Mediterranean, by the Greeks, the Latins and the Jews 
in the ancient world ; by the nations that we call Latin in 
the middle ages and in modern times. The religion, the 
political institutions and doctrines, the organization of ar- 
mies, the law, the art, the literature, the philosophy which 
today form the basis of European- American civilization, 
are, taken as a whole, the work of those nations which one 
can, from their position, describe as Mediterranean. Far 
less numerous, although more recent, are the contributions 
of the peoples which have not had the privilege of being 
able to bathe themselved in the sacred waters of that his- 
toric sea. Their enumeration is not a long one. There is 
the Reformation Lutherism, so different from Calvinism; 
that is to say, from the Reformation conceived in Latin 
countries: there is the great industrialism which makes use 
of the motor force of steam and of iron machinery, created 
by England : there is the parliamentarism, which is also an 
English creation: there is the English and German philoso- 
phy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries : and, in lit- 
erature, romanticism. To this we must add, to the score 
of the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples, some literary, 
aesthetic and juridical contributions of varying worth in the 
lines traced by the Greco-Latin genius, and the creation of 
modern science, at which the English and Germans have 

61 



52 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

worked together with the French and the Italians. Modem 
science has been created by a common effort of the peoples 
of Europe, and it would be difficult to compare each nation's 
merit. 

Creation and application are two distinct things. The 
Mediterranean peoples have created, in their long history, 
a greater number of principles of civilization than the Ger- 
manic or Anglo-Saxon peoples; this does not prevent sev- 
eral of these principles having been adopted, applied, per- 
fected, and even employed as arms against the peoples who 
had created them, by other groups. 

But, having made this reservation, one may affirm that 
modern civilization is, taken as a whole, far more the work 
of the Mediterranean peoples than of the extra-Mediter- 
ranean peoples; that it has been created in part by the 
Greeks and the Hellenized Orientals of the ancient world; 
in part by the Semitic spirit; in part by, first the Romans, 
and afterwards by the peoples we call Latin because they 
speak languages derived from Latin ; Italians, French, Span- 
iards, Portuguese. To speak only of modern Europe, it 
is the Latin peoples who achieved, in the fifteenth and six- 
teenth centuries, the greater part of that work of geographic 
exploration which was to give over the whole planet to the 
white race; it is to them above all that we owe the Renais- 
sance, that great intellectual movement of which the mod- 
ern age has been bom. It is also among these peoples that 
we must seek those who have taken the initiative in re- 
organizing great States and powerful armies in Europe after 
the poHtical parcelling-out and the disarmed cosmopolitism 
of the middle ages. The French Revolution, its intellectual 
preparation, its military epopee, the immense political, ju- 
ridical and social transformations that it brought about in 
all Europe, are Latin works. The Revolution of 1848 is 



TEUTONISM AND LATINISM 53 

another movement, at once intellectual, political and social, 
receiving its impetus from the Latin world. 

This brief enumeration should suffice to prove that these 
peoples ought not to be adjudged inferior in importance to 
any other group in Europe. They are nothing of the kind. 
For the last half century the decadence of the Latin peoples 
has been a favourite theme of the meditations of the savants, 
or of those who believe themselves such. It is spoken of 
under a thousand different forms. Spain and Portugal 
hold themselves so much aloof that their existence would be 
almost unknown had not their ancient American colonies 
become so important a part of the contemporary economic 
system. Italy, in taking part since 1859 in the politics of 
Europe, has attracted to herself the attention of the world 
more than the Iberian peninsula ; but the attention given to 
her present efforts is very small compared with the admira- 
tion bestowed on her past. Contemporary Italy still dis- 
appears almost entirely in the eyes of the world in her 
immense history. As to France, above all in the ten years 
which preceded the war, the opinion that she was a country 
fallen into decline, destined to imminent decease, was be- 
coming general. At the moment when the war broke out 
the world was already convinced, or very near convincing 
herself, that the group of peoples that are called in Europe 
Latins, had, after having achieved so many things up to the 
end of the nineteenth century, allowed itself to be rapidly 
distanced by other more energetic groups. One had, ac- 
cordingl> , the right to consider it as fallen into the rear. 

This belief had ended by penetrating even the spirit of 
the Latin peoples themselves. Under different forms and 
in different degrees these peoples have, during the last thirty 
years, alternated between continual ups and downs. At 
times they have proclaimed themselves the foremost peoples 



54 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

of the world; at times they have abandoned themselves to 
the gloomiest pessimism as to their future. It is, more- 
over, indisputable that, since 1787, the group of Latin peo- 
ples has been the most agitated, from the political stand- 
point, among the European groups. The political crises 
which have disturbed them have been far more numerous 
and more serious than those which have disturbed the 
Anglo-Saxon and the Germanic world. These crises have 
greatly contributed toward giving the world at large, and 
the Latin peoples themselves, an impression of inward weak- 
ness. And, in proportion as the consciousness of this weak- 
ness increased among these peoples, the nations benefited by 
their decadence, real or assumed, by waxing in the admira- 
tion of the world, England first, then Germany. 

England had been in Europe, between 1870 and 1900, the 
model most admired in industry, in commerce, in finance, 
in politics, in diplomacy, in social life. Germany was, up 
to that time, the model only for the army, for science, and 
for certain social institutions. But after 1900 Germany 
seemed rapidly to become the universal model, beating Eng- 
land in almost all the provinces wherein she had preserved 
until then an uncontested superiority. 

People did not continue merely to admire the German 
army and science as the foremost of the world : they began 
also to admire its industrial organization, its commercial 
methods, its system of banks, as more modern and more 
perfect models than those which England yet afforded. 
The world told itself that England was growing old, and 
more and more men's minds turned towards Berlin. It 
was Germany, by its doctrines and its example, which gave 
the final blow to the English doctrines of free trade and to 
the laisser faire of the Manchester school. It was Germany 
which alone succeeded in disputing the empire of the seas 



TEUTONISM AND LATINISM 55 

with England, by creating, in a few years, the second mer- 
chant marine and the second fleet of the world. When the 
war broke out, von Balhn was on the point of taking his 
place among the glories of Germany, by the side of Kant, 
of Goethe and of Wagner. The admiration for Germany 
had become so great that even the repugnance for its polit- 
ical institutions had diminished. The almost incredible 
indulgence of the Socialist party of all the European coun- 
tries towards the empire of the Hohenzollerns is the most 
singular proof of this. It is also no exaggeration to say 
that every one, in all the countries of Europe and America, 
had become Germanophile since 1900. The prestige of 
Germany has often been attributed to her victories of 1866 
and 1870. But the generation which had witnessed the 
military triumphs of Germany had admired Germanism far 
less than did the succeeding generation. After 1900 the 
world had no longer seen anything in Europe save Germany 
and her power, growing with a prodigious rapidity, in the 
midst of amazed or dazzled nations. 

These facts are too well known for there to be any neces- 
sity to insist upon them at length. If one relied on appear- 
ances one would have to conclude that some countries, which 
had been, for so many centuries, active and capable, had 
been all at once struck by an incurable paralysis. Almost 
all the virtues which render a people strong and a nation 
flourishing would seem to have emigrated, within a few 
years, to Germany. There have been, among the nations, 
some parvenus of power and wealth; but one had not hith- 
erto seen the parvenu of civilization : a people become, in a 
few dozen years, capable of teaching everything to every 
one, even to its former masters. Our age has witnessed 
this extraordinary phenomenon. 

It is, moreover, the explanation which, previous to the 



56 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

war, tended to become universal. The European war has 
rapidly changed that state of mind; it has even entirely re- 
versed it with many people. History has rarely witnessed 
a change so radical and so sudden. From one end of the 
world to the other millions of men have stigmatized the 
German nation as the shame of our age, as the representa- 
tive of barbarism, without any longer remembering that 
they admired it, three years ago, as the teacher and the 
model of the universe. But just because this reaction has 
been so violent and so sudden it seems profitable to pause 
and study its causes and its significance. If the world has 
forgotten that it considered as the model par excellence, only 
three years since, the people whom it regards today as bar- 
barians, the fact is not the less true, and a moment's reflec- 
tion suffices to seize at once its full import. We live in the 
most learned civilization that has ever existed. The choice 
of a master and of a model is the most serious action that 
a man or a nation can accomplish. How then has the most 
learned epoch in history been able to deceive itself in so 
gross a manner upon the most serious question in life, and 
take as model the people that it should suddenly have to 
repudiate as barbarous? Such an error must have pro- 
found causes. The search after these causes is, then, the 
most important problem which, at this moment, presents it- 
self to minds which reflect and strive to understand. 

II 

This book is devoted to the study of this great problem. 
A somewhat rapid survey suffices to reveal in contemporary 
civilization two ideals: an ideal of perfection and an ideal 
of power. The ideal of perfection is a legacy of the past 
and is composed of different elements, of which the most 



TEUTONISM AND LATINISM 67 

important are the Greco-Latin tradition, intellectual, lit- 
erar}^ artistic, juridic and political; Christian morality un- 
der its various forms; the new moral and political aspira- 
tions born during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 
It is the ideal which imposes on us beauty, truth, justice, 
the moral perfection of individuals and of institutions as the 
aim of life; which preserves in the modern world the relig- 
ious life, artistic and scientific activity, the spirit of solidar- 
ity; which improves political and social institutions, the 
works of charity and foresight. The other ideal is more 
recent: it was born in the last two centuries, in proportion 
as men perceived that they could dominate and bring into 
subjection the forces of nature in degrees formerly un- 
dreamed of. Intoxicated by their success; by the riches 
which they succeeded in producing very rapidly and in enor- 
mous quantities, thanks to a certain number of ingenious 
inventions ; by the treasures that they have discovered in the 
earth, ransacked in all directions; by their victories over 
space and over time, modern men have considered as an 
ideal of life, at once beautiful, lofty and almost heroic, the 
indefinite and unlimited increase of human power. 

The former of these ideals, the ideal of perfection, can 
be considered, in Europe, as the Latin ideal. The Latin 
genius has shown its originality and its power, and has won 
its highest glory, in striving to realize certain ideals of 
perfection; that is to say, in creating arts, literatures, re- 
ligions, laws, well-organized states. That does not at all 
mean that the Latin peoples have not also contributed to- 
wards creating the ideal of power. The history of France 
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would suffice 
to ensure to this group of peoples an important place in the 
great change in the history of the world which is repre- 
sented by the advent of this new ideal. But the Latin peo- 



58 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

pies, who are the peoples of Europe whose civilization is the 
oldest, have achieved things too great in the periods in 
which the ideals of perfection dominated alone, or almost 
alone, for their life not to be still charged with the spirit 
of those periods. If, however, in that w^hich relates to the 
ideals of perfection, the Latin peoples can claim a well- 
defined and characterized historic role, it is not the same 
in regard to the new ideal of power. They have developed 
this in conjunction with other peoples of different race. 
One cannot then attribute a very precise significance to these 
words, " the Latin genius," without identifying this genius 
with the irresistible tendency which causes peoples and in- 
dividuals to desire all the forms of perfection of which the 
human spirit is capable. 

The ideal of power can, on the contrary, be considered 
at this moment as a Germanic ideal. Here also, one must 
not fall into the error of believing that this ideal has been 
created by the Germans. Germany has contributed less 
than France to the long and painful work which was to end 
in the unfolding of this ideal in the world. But it is also 
unquestionable that, if it has been slow to understand the 
new ideal, Germany has ended by becoming, during the 
last thirty years, its most ardent champion in Europe. The 
immense development of Germany, which had astounded 
the world, is nothing else than this new ideal of power trans- 
formed by the Germans into a kind of national religion, 
become a sort of Messiahism, and applied with an implaca- 
ble logic and an ardent passion to carry it out to its extreme 
consequences in all departments; no longer only in manu- 
factures and business, as with the Americans, but in the 
world of ideas, and, an application more dangerous, in war 
and the army. 

But, this distinction between the two ideals once made. 



TEUTONISM AND LATINISM 59 

it is possible to understand the immense tragedy of which 
we are at once the actors, the spectators and the victims; 
to explain the unsettlement of ideas which it has produced, 
and to cast a glance into the future and at the duties which 
await us. It suffices for the understanding of why and how 
our age had associated these two ideals, believing that they 
could develop limitlessly and peaceably side by side, whereas 
at a certain point they were bound to enter into a violent 
conflict. That is what we are going to try to do. 

Ill 

No profound analysis is required to discover that one of 
the characteristic phenomena of the last thirty years has 
been, in Europe, the decline of the ancient ideals of perfec- 
tion and the growing prestige of the ideal of power. It is 
the universal fact that had been masked under the most 
diverse names, such as '* triumph of the practical spirit," 
" the economic progress of the age," ** the realist policy," 
" the modem tendencies." This triumph of the ideal of 
power is, moreover, as will be seen in this book, the gather- 
ing to a head of a very complex historic movement whose 
origins date back very far. It has been, however, accel- 
erated, during the last hundred years, by some immediate 
causes. I will cite the principal of them: the immense 
growth of the English power, the wealth accumulated by 
England and France, the victories of Germany, the develop- 
ment of the two Americas, the exploration and conquest of 
Africa, the increase of the population and of public, civil 
and military expenses which demanded an increase of pro- 
duction; the improvement of industrial plant, the progress 
of the sciences, the decline of the aristocracies, monarchies 
and Churches which represented in Europe the spirit of 



60 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

quality or the ideals of perfection; the exhaustion of several 
of these ideals, which rendered necessary a revival; the 
weakening of the governments; the accession to power of 
the middle classes; the growing importance acquired by the 
masses and by number in everything, in the armies, in 
politics, in industry. Left to themselves, freed from the 
old restraints, the masses, having but little culture, were 
bound to lean rather towards the ideal of power which satis- 
fies the primordial instincts, such as pride, cupidity, ambi- 
tion, than towards the ideals of perfection which always 
demand the spirit of sacrifice and a certain power of renun- 
ciation. 

It was in the immense refulgence of this ideal of power 
that Germany increased to so great an extent in the world's 
estimate during the first fourteen years of the century. If 
it were, in truth, the supreme duty of humanity to unite 
all its forces towards augmenting its power, Germany would 
have been the true model for the world. The ideal of 
power, grown into a national religion, together with a com- 
bination of favourable circumstances, such as its central 
position, the neighbourhood of Russia, the abundance of oil, 
the rapid increase of population, the general economic 
development of all countries, had produced in Germany an 
unparalleled explosion of energy. Supported by a strong 
government endowed with indisputable capacity, the Ger- 
man race, industry, commerce, science and diplomacy had 
invaded the world, multiplied their enterprises, conceived 
the most audacious plans. Success had not always smiled 
upon these enterprises; but the checks had never discour- 
aged either the people or the government. Everywhere the 
German had penetrated or assayed to penetrate, disturbing 
the calm tranquillity of established positions, introducing 
a new spirit of activity, of novelty, of competition; aiming 



TEUTONISM AND LATINISM 61 

to conquer the foremost place by a struggle as tenacious as 
it was devoid of scruples. 

History had not previously beheld an example of such 
feverish activity. The United States themselves could not 
sustain the comparison. They have achieved great things 
in industry by exploiting a territory of nine million square 
kilometres. The Germans had succeeded in drawing all the 
goods with which they flooded the earth ; all the ideas, good 
or bad, with which they filled the brains ; the strongest army 
and the second fleet of the world, from a territory of six 
hundred thousand kilometres. Increasingly hypnotized by 
the one ideal of power, the world had been dazzled by that 
amazing activity and no longer attached any importance 
to the question of the methods by which Germany achieved 
her success. What did it matter if, so far back as 1870, 
she had resuscitated the old barbarous soul of war and pro- 
claimed, the sovereign rights of force? What did it matter 
if she had developed her industry and commerce by means 
of artificial methods of procedure such as dumping; by a 
systematic deterioration of the quality of all the goods 
manufactured, and by making use without any scruple of 
all the means of falsification that the human mind can in- 
vent ? To blame these practices would have required ideals 
of perfection, or qualifying standards of appraisement. 
But these were growing confused, losing their prestige and 
their force. . . . The result alone counted. In the crum- 
bling to pieces of all the ideals of perfection there remained 
standing, in the centre of Europe, gigantic, triumphant, only 
Germany. It is now possible for us to explain why the 
idea of the decadence of the Latin peoples had ended by 
forcing itself upon all, the Latin peoples themselves in- 
cluded. The Latin countries, even the two strongest, 
France and Italy, were incapable of rivalling Germany in 



62 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

this endeavour for power. France had not a sufficient 
population. The increase of population is a necessary con- 
dition of increase of power. Italy had the population; but 
coal was lacking to her. To these material causes were 
added some psychological causes; that is to say, a certain 
persistence of sentiments which dated back to the periods 
of qualitative civilization; the habit of economy; the repug- 
nance to continual agitation, to incessant innovation, to the 
spirit of modernism carried to excess, to the mania of speed. 
In conclusion, the political situation of these countries ren- 
dered it impossible for their governments to support the 
effort of the nation with as much energy and intelligence as 
the German government was able to do. 

For all these reasons, these nations have by degrees come 
to feel themselves inferior, in the struggle for power, to 
the Germany which, though succeeding therein only in part, 
they sought to imitate. Hence a very grave consequence. 
The ideal of power, reacting on France and Italy, excited 
there, in all classes, the appetite for facile gains, the desire 
for rapid enrichment, all the forms of arrivisme. But, not 
having been able fully to develop itself, it has not excited 
in the same degree the correlative qualities and vices which 
rendered the German life a system which, if not perfect 
as superficial observers thought it, was at least complete 
and coherent in its dangerous absurdity; audacity, pride, 
the habit of doing everything, even follies, on a large scale ; 
the spirit of co-operation: confidence in the future; disci- 
pline; that kind of extravagant Messianic fervour by which 
the German was convinced that he was regenerating the 
world by inundating it with bad goods. Taking all in all 
the two countries remained more attached than Germany 
to the old ideals of perfection; remained, that is to say, . . . 
and the war has proved it ... in a more elevated intel- 



TEUTONISM AND LATINISM 63 

lectual and moral state. But at the same time they brought 
into the economic life a timidity, a limitation, a spirit of 
distrust, of isolation and of realism; an absence of all mys- 
tic illusion, which, combining with the appetite for gains 
and the desire for riches, engendered egoisms and corrup- 
tions very harmful, whether to the economic system, or to 
the whole social organization of the country. This state of 
things provoked a great discontent and gave to one part of 
public opinion, in the two countries, a very painful sense of 
intellectual and moral incapacity in comparison with Ger- 
many. 

An effort which but half succeeds is always painful, to an 
individual as to a people. To this sentiment of partial in- 
capacity were added very well justified apprehensions of a 
real danger. This people which was multiplying in the 
centre of Europe, and developing its power with such ra- 
pidity under the leadership of an energetic government, was 
it not a danger for the surrounding nations ? But all these 
anxieties and fears would not have become so agonizing, 
in the years preceding the war, save for an illusion wherein 
lies the profound cause of the immense present crisis. The 
ideals of perfection, which could have limited to wiser pro- 
portions our admiration for Germany, had grown dim in 
the mind of the world; but they had not been officially 
abjured. No one would have admitted, even before the 
war, the wish to live in a world without beauty, without 
justice, without truth. When one spoke of progress or of 
civilization one always meant it to be understood, more or 
less clearly, as moral and intellectual improvement. Our 
age desired power, but it also desired, in all sincerity, char- 
ity, equity, justice, truth, good. It was easily angered if 
any one doubted of these virtues. Unfortunately, if it 
wanted these blessings, it was not the less constrained, by 



64 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

dominating passions and interests, to sacrifice them daily 
to its desire for riches and power. It was a question, then, 
for our age, of increasing its riches and power inimitably, 
while escaping the reproach of paying for these material 
advantages by a moral deterioration of the whole of society. 
The problem was difficult: how has it resolved it? It has 
found a simple and convenient means of reconciling the 
ideal of power and the ideal of perfection : it has mixed and 
confused them. With the aid of a numerous army of 
sophists, it has convinced itself that the world would im- 
prove, would become wiser, more moral, more beautiful, in 
short, more perfect, in proportion as it grew rich and de- 
veloped its power. Quantity could increase and quality 
improve indefinitely, side by side. 

What a part in the intellectual life of the nineteenth cen- 
tury has been played by this necessity, in which our age 
found itself, of confusing ideas upon this vital point! 
What theories have been admired because they arose from 
this confusion, and assisted in producing it, in the minds 
of men! That of the superman, for example. But Ger- 
many was still the country which derived most benefit from 
that confusion. The apparent order which reigned in the 
country, and that almost perfect co-ordination of all the 
efforts of the nation towards power, seemed the ideal of 
intellectual and moral perfection. Germany became the 
model of all the perfections. Because she was the most 
powerful country, she was considered as the most intelli- 
gent nation, the most learned, the wisest, the most moral, 
the most serious in the world. She had solved, better than 
the other nations, all the problems of the period and real- 
ized the ideal of the most perfect life. Her law, her social 
institutions, her sciences, her music, seemed unsurpassable: 
she was even beginning to become a model in the arts. 



TEUTONISM AND LATINISM 65 

Germany had transferred into the arts her mania for mod- 
ernism, her capacity for imitation, and her spirit of organ- 
ization ; that which, in the immense aesthetic anarchy of the 
period, seemed, to a certain number of spirits discontented 
with the present, the dawn of a new era. Even the Social- 
ists were converted, in the Latin countries, to admiration 
for Germany. In seeking a pretext for recriminations 
against the bourgeois regime, they had forgotten that it 
was to that regime that they owed the possibiHty of existing 
as a party : they exalted the " social laws " enacted by the 
military oligarchy which governs Germany as a grand prog- 
ress of which their own countries were not capable; and the 
German Socialist party which, without the liberties given 
to the world by the French Revolution, would not have 
been able even to exist, as the true liberator of the world ! 
Which is tantamount to saying that the government of the 
Junker was more just and more humane than the demo- 
cratic governments of Western Europe. Europe was de- 
luding herself with these absurd illusions, when all at once 
the sky and earth trembled. Germany had just fired the 
mine. 

IV 

Within a week the nation which had been the model of 
all the virtues became the object of imiversal execration. 
The dictionary no longer held adjectives adequate to stig- 
matize it. It was banished from the society of civilized 
nations. What had taken place in eight days? A thing 
simple and tragic: the ideal of perfection and the ideal of 
power, which the world had confused, as if they could de- 
velop indefinitely side by side, were entered into conflict. 
Therein lies the profound significance of the whole present 
crisis. 



66 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

A philosopher would have been able to foresee a priori 
that this conflict would break forth one day or another. 
This prevision belonged to the number of certitudes that 
one could call dialectique, because they can be arrived at by 
reasoning; and which are the more sure if, to arrive at 
them, the argument takes its start from a well-established 
truth. A common-sense truth could in this case lead easily 
to this prevision: which is, that the blessings of life are 
mutually allied one to another in such a manner that they 
mutually limit each other in different ways; and that if one 
wishes to enjoy a blessing beyond a certain degree, one 
must renounce the other which formed its limit. But then, 
very often, even the blessing which one has too much de- 
sired becomes an evil. " For a fortnight," ... so spoke, 
some years before the war, an old man who had known 
men and the world ..." we have argued to discover what 
was of greater value, to produce riches, to create works of 
art, or to discover truths ; and up to what point it was good 
to desire wealth. . . . Now, in doing this, what have we 
done save to seek the relations which exist between Art, 
Truth, Morality, Utility, Pleasure, Duty, Equity ; that is to 
say, between the blessings of hfe? These are questions 
which greatly interest philosophers, who readily imagine 
that the world is perpetually in trouble because they do not 
succeed in resolving these grave problems. But does not 
life take it upon herself to answer them each day? Is it 
then so difficult to understand that these things are the lim- 
its, the one of the other? Duty can put a bridle on Pleas- 
ure and preserve it from perilous abuses : the sense of the 
Beautiful can preserve Morality from certain excesses of 
asceticism: Morality can turn Art aside from certain in- 
decent subjects : Utility hold Truth a little in check, remind- 
ing man that * all Truth is not good to utter ' ; or can pre- 



TEUTONISM AND LATINISM 67 

vent Morality and Art from becoming dehumanized by- 
becoming ends unto themselves; and so on. What is 
history if not the perpetual effort of the will to discover new- 
balances (equilibriums) and more perfect limitations be- 
tween these elements of life? "^ 

It is the same with justice, charity, reverence, equity, 
loyalty, chivalric sentiment; with all those ideals of moral 
perfection which the world had not renounced, and of 
power. Power and these ideals do not necessarily exclude 
each other, but they mutually limit each other. The 
stronger the ideals are in a nation or an individual, so much 
the more will power acquired by violating justice, charity, 
equity and loyalty horrify them : they will want power only 
within the limits traced by these ideals of moral perfection. 
The stronger the ambition for power, the more easily and 
indifferently will an individual and a nation overstep these 
limits. If the ambition for power become, in a man or in 
a nation, a kind of religion or Messianic mysticism, these 
limits will end by being regarded as obstacles that the man 
or the nation must overthrow, and with which they will 
boast of being openly in conflict. That is what has hap- 
pened to Germany, before the eyes of the terrified world. 
Intoxicated by its success, by the flatteries of which it was 
the object, by the idea of its strength, by the hope of an 
immense triumph, Germany had ended by believing, as, 
moreover, the greater number of its admirers believed, that 
it was the best because it was the strongest : it was obvious, 
then, that it would improve in proportion as it should 
increase in strength : consequently, all that it did to augment 
its power was good. The spirit of a whole people, power- 
ful, strong, numerous, once set upon this declivity, and it 
was bound to slide rapidly into the worst excesses. 

* " Entre les Deux Mondes," Paris, 1913, p. 415. 



68 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

But if Germany, which was the strongest and which 
hoped to win, had easily confused with the good all that 
which favoured her immense ambitions, the peoples at- 
tacked, who felt themselves the weaker and who saw them- 
selves menaced by a fearful danger, took refuge by the 
deserted altars of Justice, of Equity, of chivalrous Generos- 
ity, of Loyalty; that is to say, they opposed to Germany 
and its ideal of power the old ideals of perfection. From 
that moment they have recommenced, in all the nations 
which speak languages derived from the Latin, to exalt the 
Latin genius, the Latin spirit, the Latin civilization, in 
prose and verse. And with reason; for the Latin genius 
sums up the ideals of perfection, which alone can limit the 
aspirations of man after criminal power. But if the Latin 
ideal is above all and before all an ideal of perfection, it is 
necessary for all those who today exalt the Latin genius 
and oppose it to Germanism, to bear well in mind that it 
represents the opposite of what one had formed the habit 
of most admiring in Germany: of that insatiable aspiration 
after an unlimited growth of power; of that untiring and 
unscrupulous activity; of that spirit of invasion; of that 
taste for all which is enormous, colossal, extravagant, vio- 
lent. We must not delude ourselves too much: the ideal 
of a power which should grow indefinitely has seduced the 
minds of many and has deeply penetrated into even the 
Latin countries. Even today, after so much bloodshed, 
many adversaries of Germany waver between the horror 
and fear of the excesses committed by it, and the desire to 
appropriate its methods and the secret of its successes. We 
must not too far forget that powerful interests are bound 
up, even in the Latin countries, with that ideal of boundless 
power, whereas every ideal of perfection imposes limits, 
restrictions and renunciations. 



TEUTONISM AND LATINISM 69 

V 

It is above all for this reason that the present war seems 
bound to be the beginning of a very long and complicated 
historical crisis. This immense catastrophe has shown the 
world that it is not possible to want at one and the same 
time an unlimited increase of power and a continual moral 
progress ; that sooner or later the moment comes when the 
choice must be made between justice, charity, loyalty, and 
power, riches, success. But it is not so easy to make the 
choice as to say that it must be made. A few examples will 
show what transformations and responsibilities this choice 
implies, should the world decide one day to limit afresh 
the ideal of power and the ambitions which it engenders, 
by ideals, old or new, of perfection. These examples will 
at the same time give an idea of the practical conclusions 
of which the ideas expounded in this book, and the concep- 
tion of the European conflict which is there set forth, per- 
mit; they will thus lead to a better understanding of that 
which a renaissance of the Latin spirit will signify in mod- 
em civilization on the day when it shall appear. 

In many States there is a question of alcoholism. It is 
serious above all in France, In what does this question 
consist? It is only one of the consequences of the effort 
for the imlimited increase of production of all things, use- 
ful or harmful, which characterizes our age. Alone among 
all the civilizations of history, our civilization has applied 
itself with the same energy to manufacture ever greater 
quantities of all products, from alcohol to explosives, from 
cannons to aeroplanes, without ever troubling itself as to 
the use that would be made of them. It is thus that enor- 
mous quantities of alcohol have been distilled ; and after 
having been distilled they have been given to the million 



70 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

to drink, even at the risk of destroying whole nations. The 
primary sources of the vice are in the industry and not in 
the men. It is not the thirst of men which obhges indus- 
try and agriculture to produce drink in ever increasing 
quantity : it is industry and agriculture which, swept along 
by the tremendous economic on-rush of the world, augment 
the production; and, to dispose of it all, teach the masses 
to get drunk. The question of alcoholism is, in short, pri- 
marily a question of over-production. Our ancestors were 
much more sober, not because they were wiser or more 
virtuous or more devout; but because they produced less 
alcohol, and the little that they produced was of better qual- 
ity. They could not drink the alcohol which did not exist. 
The deduction is clear. To eradicate this plague the 
State must claim the faculty of limiting certain productions 
for moral and patriotic reasons; that is to say, set moral 
limits to the ceaselessly growing productive power of mod- 
ern industry. Neither propaganda committees, nor lec- 
tures, nor sermons, nor pamphlets, nor even the reduction 
of the number of public-houses, will cure the evil so long 
as such great quantities of alcohol shall continue to be dis- 
distilled. If we want to save the masses from this curse, 
there is only one way : entirely to prohibit the distillation of 
the alcohols of inferior quality destined for the making of 
liqueurs, and rigorously to limit the production of the alco- 
hols of superior quality. The people will be obliged to drink 
less when they no longer have anything at their disposition 
but wine, beer, and a few very expensive liqueurs. 

Another serious question brought forward by the war is 
that of the limits of commercial competition between the 
different nations. Every one knows that the development 
of the German industry and commerce has been in part 
obtained with the aid of special methods of competition, 



TEUTONISM AND LxVTINISM 71 

such as dumping, and innumerable ingenious adulterations 
German chemistry has been the great accomplice of all these 
adulterations. These are ways of acting which can only be 
justified if one admits that quantity is everything in the 
world; that each people ought to seek only to produce sell 
and consume as much as it can; that the worth of nations 
IS measured by the figures of its exports; and that, to in. 
crease the raw total of commerce, all means are good. But 
these are the principles which have led Germany to destroy 
herself in destroying Europe for the satisfaction of its inor- 
dmate ambition; and against which we have been protesting 
for years past by opposing the Latin spirit, and its ideals of 
moral perfection, to the unscrupulous lusts of Germanism' 
If, then, we wish for the spirit of justice, loyalty, a certain 
feehng of trust, to regulate in future the relations between 
the civilized peoples of Europe, we must apply curbs and 
limits to these equivocal procedures. It is so much the more 
necessary in that, if we do not succeed in this, there is no 
doubt that every one will set to after the war to imitate 
the German system: with what result? It is easy to pre- 
dict! It is therefore necessary to endeavour to impose 
moral regulations upon international competition: but by 
what means ? There seems only one : to revert, by modern- 
izing it, to an old doctrine which was less an economic law 
than a moral^ principle imposed on economics: the just price 
of things. " Carius venders vel villus enter e rem quam va- 
leat . . . injiistun/' ssiid Saint Thomas. The application of 
this principle in this case can be made without hesitation, 
for no one will question that he who buys a thing at a 
price lower than the cost of its production buys it below 
its^ worth. It must then be affirmed that dumping, while 
being of service to the people who profit by it, weakens 
m the mind the concept of the just price of things; accus- 



72 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

toming some, on the one hand, to consume products in a 
quantity beyond what they ought to consume, granted their 
wealth and the general wealth; obliging others to work at 
too low a price; disturbing the whole system of retributions. 
Consequently all the States ought to unite together to pro- 
hibit dumping in all its forms; and each State ought to 
reserve to itself the supreme faculty of quashing, by equiva- 
lent taxes, the dumping that another State should not be 
willing or able to repress. 

Not less grave is the question of adulteration as a normal 
procedure of modern industry. For the last century it has 
enriched many manufacturers; it has benefited above all 
the Germans, who have made use of it with their customary 
energy and audacity; but it is one of the most dangerous 
of the procedures of modern commerce and industry. As 
dumping destroys in men's minds the conception of the just 
price of things, these adulterations render men more and 
more incapable of distinguishing what is good from what 
is bad or mediocre ; that is to say, they stifle in our civiliza- 
tion the sense of quality. Now, in proportion as one stifles 
in men the sense of quality, the commercial and industrial 
struggle must necessarily develop itself in the sense of quan- 
tity. The business which will pour forth, and know how 
to impose, upon the world, the greatest abundance of worse 
products will be victorious. But when men exert them- 
selves, not to make articles of a certain quality and have 
them admired, but to produce and sell the largest number 
of articles in the shortest time; it is a victory over matter, 
over time and over space that they aspire to, and not a 
refinement of their tastes and capacities. It is then an 
ideal of power and not an ideal of perfection that they are 
seeking after. It is thus possible to reconstitute the chain 
which links these processes of adulteration, recognized as 



TEUTONISM AND LATINISM 73 

legitimate by modern trade, to the present crisis. The pro- 
cedures of falsification stifle the sense of quality; quality 
is the only natural limit of quantity; the more the sense 
of quality becomes obtuse in a period, the more industry and 
commerce find themselves tmder the necessity of struggling 
for quantity; that is to say, of indefinitely increasing pro- 
duction. This struggle for quantity brings about of neces- 
sity the triumph of an ideal of power over all the ideals 
of perfection; and we see, since 1914, the possible conse- 
quences of such a triumph in a people which was conscious 
of possessing the strongest army in the world. 

As to the procedures of adulteration, we can repeat what 
has been already said of dumping: if a curb be not put upon 
them they will generalize themselves after the war. Every 
one will want to employ against Germany the arms which 
it has forged and with which it has wounded us. But is 
it possible to put a curb on this evil? Yes: if the States 
again became, while adapting themselves to the exigencies 
of a world so greatly enlarged, what they were formerly; 
the guarantees of the quality of the goods. They ought 
not, as they did once, to impose upon manufactures a cer- 
tain standard of perfection ; they ought to continue to recog- 
nize the right, granted by the industrial revolution of the 
nineteenth century to manufactures and commerce, of de- 
basing the quality to the advantage of the quantity, as much 
as they want, and as they can; but they ought ruthlessly 
to deny them the right of hiding this deterioration of quality 
by all the deceptions which industry and commerce misuse 
today. Very strong interior legislations and a whole well 
supported system of international conventions ought to pre- 
vent industry and commerce from deceiving the public as 
to the origin, the composition, the solidity, as to the most 
important qualities, in short, of the goods. Laws of this 



74s EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

kind were formerly very numerous, in the periods of quali- 
tative civilization; quantity, triumphing with steam ma- 
chinery, has swept them aside; but many much deplored 
inconveniences of the present economic regime would 
disappear if one returned to the inspiratory principle of 
those old laws, adapting it to the requirements of the modern 
world. One can even say that these inconveniences will 
only disappear on the day when industry and commerce 
shall accept these moral limits. 

The commercial adulterations are, moreover, only a part 
of a much greater problem; of the greatest moral problem 
of our age: that of loyalty. For the last three years the 
German lies and perfidies are the wonder of the world. 
One asks oneself how our century can have engendered a 
people which breaks its pledged word so easily and knows 
how to lie with such audacity. Would it not be more 
reasonable to ask oneself what good faith and regard for 
truth could be found in a people which had enriched itself, 
and succeeded in obtaining the admiration of the whole 
world, through adulterating almost all the products of the 
earth? In this defect also the Germans perhaps represent 
our age better than one thinks. Our age has accomplished 
great things and has many virtues; but it shows itself more 
and more uncertain and weak in the conception of honour. 
May I be allowed to quote a book written before the war? 
" No century had ever so great a need as ours to set a limit 
to the liberty to lie. For it is in vain that I try to preach 
that man ought to advance towards the future without 
turning his head; I do not deceive myself, you know. Pre- 
cisely because there are limits, conventional and always 
provisional limits, man is ceaselessly at war with the prin- 
ciples upon which social and moral order rest. Interests 
and passions continually seek either to overthrow these 



TEUTONISM AND LATINISM 75 

limits by violent means, . . . wars, revolutions, seditions, 
martial laws, bombs, outrages, crimes ; or, more frequently, 
to elude them by sophistry, because that is less dangerous. 
How is it that sophistry is never dead of the mortal wounds 
which logic has inflicted upon it in so many memorable 
duels? Why have all ages licenced and loaded with gold 
an official body of sophists, ... the lawyers? How could 
Socrates believe that he was accomplishing a great moral 
reform by teaching men to argue well? Because sophistry 
is the arsenal to which man resorts to seek the means of 
observing principles when they accord him a right, and to 
elude them, while feigning to respect them, when they im- 
pose a duty upon him. Now, if man has already resorted 
largely to this arsenal in the times when principles were 
consecrated by religion, what will he not do today when, 
having passed out of childhood, he has discovered the secret 
of the game ? The critical spirit is too keen in our age, we 
are too old, we know history too well and are henceforth 
too much accustomed to enjoy the unbridled liberty in the 
midst of which we live ! And you were right again, Caval- 
canti, when you said that, if our civilization is to such a 
point plastic, progressive, ardent, it is to these facts that it 
owes it. The more, then, that a man ages, the more he 
grows rich, learned, powerful, so much the more he ought 
to repeat to himself, and profoundly to inculcate in his 
spirit this supreme rule of wisdom: 'Go forward, without 
ever turning thy head to see what arm compels thee; be- 
lieve in the'principle that thou professest and observe it as 
if it were imposed on thee by God, as if it represented the 
sole truth, the sole beauty, the sole virtue, the health and 
the salvation of the world; discuss not, argue not, com- 
promise not; be faithful to thy conviction to the end, with- 
out fearing to risk for it thy life and thy fortune; force 



76 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

thyself not to lie and not to betray, then no other person 
can force thee to do so. But if thy principle breaks down, 
resign thyself to its fall as if it had been but a human, con- 
ventional and arbitrary limitation of that infinite Truth, 
that infinite Beauty, that infinite Good which continues to 
circulate in the world through the channel of the new prin- 
ciple which has swept away thine own. ' Triumphant quan- 
tity, on the contrary, teaches us from the cradle to lie to 
others and to ourselves, to perfect ourselves in all the arts 
of mystification. Why? Because if, in fact, quantity tri- 
umphs in the world today, thanks to machinery, to fire, to 
America, it cannot, in spite of all, assume openly and in its 
own name the government of the world : for man always 
and everywhere, in no matter what condition and at what 
moment, requires to translate quantity into quality, and to 
believe that the things he makes use of correspond to an 
ideal of perfection. Even at a period when the world has 
so sadly deteriorated and when almost all the standards of 
measure have been impaired or confused in mediocrity ; even 
today, I say, no one recognizes a thing as better merely be- 
cause it costs more; that is to say, to make quantity the 
criterion of quality. Quite the contrary, each wishes to 
persuade himself that, if he pays a higher price, it is be- 
cause the thing is better; if not it would seem to him that 
he was admitting his own folly to himself. That is why 
quantity has to take the mask of quality and use fraud to 
deceive men and make them believe that, at the very mo- 
ment when they are only procuring abundance for them- 
selves, they are also seeking after beauty or excellence. 
What are all these Smyrna carpets woven at Monza; all 
these Japanese goods or all this Indian furniture manufac- 
tured at Hamburg or in Bavaria ; all these Parisian novel- 
ties made in a hundred places; all these rabbits whom a 



TEUTONISM AND LATINISM 77 

few weeks suffice to change into otters; all these cham- 
pagnes made in America, in Germany, in Italy, if not the 
lies of quantity, which steals from ruined and proscribed 
quality her last rags ? Who does not know with how many 
processes and substances chemistry has furnished industry 
for the deception of the public? It is not then surprising 
that our society no longer possesses any instrument of 
truth and faith which may act upon consciences as did 
formerly the oath and honour by which religions and aris- 
tocracies constrained man to be sincere when he might lie 
with impunity, faithful when he might have been a traitor. 
And from that time onwards we see many difficulties spring 
up and grow serious in modern society for the solution of 
which we tax our ingenuity to find theories, institutions, 
preventive measures. But all such efforts remain unsuc- 
cessful, because these difficulties are nothing but questions 
of loyalty. If the sentiment of loyalty existed, it would 
resolve them in an instant." ^ 



VI 

But I seem to see more than one reader smile, and to 
hear repeated the objection which a justified scepticism sug- 
gests to many persons. " All these ideas are excellent on 
paper. But will it ever be possible to apply them? Will 
the evil passions and the interests of men ever consent? " 

I do not deceive myself, for example, as to the diffi- 
culties that modern States, enfeebled as they are, will en- 
counter upon the day when they shall wish to become once 
more the guarantors of quality in an economic world so 
much vaster and more encumbered than the old. And yet 
industry and commerce are not even the field wherein the 

1 Entre les deux mondes, p. 370 



78 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

ideal of power and the ideal of perfection are destined to 
fight their sternest battles. The same principles can apply 
to questions far more grave and vital, to which I shall 
merely allude, just because they are too grave, and the mo- 
ment to examine them thoroughly has not yet arrived. But 
there is no doubt at all that the Latin ideal of life, for 
instance, would on the day when it should be able to expend 
itself afresh in all its strength and coherency, lead Europe 
to the limitation of armaments under all their forms, from 
the invention of new engines of war to the manufacture 
of arms and effective forces. It is in war that the ideal 
of power, represented by Germany, has most entirely de- 
stroyed all the ancient ideals of moral perfection in which 
we believed ; it is in war that a strong reaction will be most 
necessary if we desire to save modern civilization from an 
irreparable catastrophe. But the limitation of armaments 
implies another change, the import of which is even more 
tremendous; and which raises, under another form, the 
problem of loyalty upon which we have already touched. 
It is that the States of Europe consent to limit by treaties, 
the one toward the others, and in equal ratio, their sovereign 
rights, in view of a superior interest, common to all. It is 
enough merely to state this for all its difficulties to be appre- 
hended. 

And yet it would be an error to consider all these ideas 
as Utopias which cannot be realized. They are not, most 
undoubtedly, necessities upon which one can count as upon 
the accomplishment of a natural law ; but they are possibili- 
ties which depend upon the human will. We find ourselves 
in a sphere where all depends upon what men want. If one 
had said to a man of the sixteenth century that the organ- 
ization of the authority and tradition under which he lived 
would one day fall, he would have shrugged his shoulders. 



TEUTONISM AND LATINISM 79 

But man has certainly succeeded in the last two centuries 
in overthrowing the principles upon which society was based 
even to the point of letting loose on the earth this hurricane 
of fire and sword; because he desired the unlimited aggran- 
dizement of his power. Let us look at the world : millions 
of men are butchering each other; empires are falling to 
pieces; riches produced by two generations are melting 
away; the fury of destruction rages on the land, on sea, in 
the air; twenty centuries of moral progress seem anni- 
hilated; sparks of the immense conflagration have been car- 
ried by the wind across the Atlantic. If men have desired 
all that which has rendered inevitable this chaotic explosion 
of savage passions, is it rash to hope that they will some 
day also desire that which would assure to the world a 
little more true order, faith, justice, loyalty, charity? But 
that which one might call the will of periods, that is to say, 
the great currents of the civilizations which succeed one 
another, is a very mysterious phenomenon. They seem to 
be the work of the human spirit and yet to be superior to 
the spirit of each man, as if a people, a nation, a series of 
generations, were something more than the aggregate of 
the human beings of which these human groups are made 
up; as if they enjoyed to the full that liberty of choice 
which individuals may avail themselves of in only a small 
degree. It is for that reason impossible to say if, and when, 
men will desire a more stable and just society than that 
which is today struggling in this crisis of mad violence; 
and after what endeavours and wanderings they will desire 
it. But, whether that day be near or distant, the duty of 
the historian, the moralist, the philosopher, does not change. 
They ought to set before their contemporaries how, under the 
surprises, the horrors and the ruins of this crisis; in all the 
contradictions and uncertainties amid which our age strug- 



80 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

gles ; in the difficulties which present themselves on all sides ; 
and in those, yet greater, which will present themselves; 
is lurking this dilemma of perfection and of power from 
which the world cannot escape. The struggle between the 
Latin genius and the Germanic genius is nothing else than 
this. The historian, the moralist, the philosopher, are not 
authorized to essert that man ought to prefer perfection to 
power. Man will be free in the future to resolve the prob- 
lem, as he has been in the past, in deciding for one or other 
of the alternatives. But what the historian, the moralist 
and the philosopher can, and ought to, say is that it is im- 
possible to want both the two at once; and to seek to in- 
crease indefinitely, at the same time, these two good things. 
Present events furnish conclusive proof of this. Have we 
not, for the last two years, seen returning among us what 
one considered as the phantoms of ages for ever dead; 
sumptuary laws; restrictions upon international commerce 
and on the consumption of goods; the taxation of prices and 
wages? Have we not seen all at once thrift, economy, sim- 
plicity, the limitation of needs, become once more civic vir- 
tues, exalted, as at the time of Caesar and Augustus, by 
even those who used to wish to banish them, in the name 
of progress, from the world? Have we not been obliged 
abruptly, from one day to the next, by the force of circum- 
stances, to revert to methods and ideas created by periods 
which had subordinated economic activity to ideals of moral 
perfection? And what does this inspired volte face signify, 
save that, whatever he may do, the moment will always 
come when man, if he do not do it spontaneously, will be 
obliged by the very laws of life to choose between the two 
ideals? The whole question for him then reduces itself 
into knowing whether he will choose by force, that is to say, 
ill, by suffering, and without gain; or if he will choose 



TEUTONISM AND LATINISM 81 

spontaneously according to an organic and exalted concept 
of life and its aims. 

All these truths are very simple. But it was perhaps not 
profitless to expound them at a moment when the minds of 
men are so disturbed. They will be able in any case to 
assist some readers to profit by the experience of the author, 
who has himself, at the outset, run the risk of losing himself 
in the fog of this great intellectual and moral confusion; 
and who, thanks to these simple truths, has at least suc- 
ceeded in avoiding the misfortune of being an admirer of 
the German system in the years which preceded the war. 



CHAPTER III 
Ancient Rome and Modern Culture 



ANCIENT ROME AND MODERN CULTURE 

I 

Standing on the Capitol, the sacred hill of Rome, after a 
long absence spent in foreign travel, I recall the time, 
already far distant, when I finally took the resolution of 
writing a new history of Rome! Perhaps none of these 
memories is sweeter to me than that of the anxieties, the 
uncertainties, the doubts which, at the moment of departure, 
thronged about my path to hold me back. " Why write a 
new history of Rome? Is it to be presumed that our age, 
which rushes forward towards the future with such tre- 
mendous impetus, should find, in the midst of this un- 
bridled career, the necessary leisure to turn its head, were 
it but for a moment, and contemplate a past so remote? 
Is the moment really come to write this new history of 
Rome? Has not history now entered upon its scientific 
phase, and is it not consequently bound to prepare the new 
synthesis by a long and minute analysis? " 

At the moment of departure I was not in a position to 
reply to these misgivings with precision and with assurance ; 
which would have been serious if history were, indeed, as 
some claim, a pure science, whose methods should be rigor- 
ously controllable and strictly obligatory. But, luckily, his- 
tory is, or can be, something more than a science ; it can be 
an art capable of acting in various ways upon the spirit of 
men, on their dispositions and on their tendencies. It can, 
then, be a form of action ; and action, when it has a raison 
d'etre, always ends by becoming conscious of this in propor- 
tion as it attains its goal. It is thus that I found the answer 
to these distressing questions along the worid-roads; and 

85 



66 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

for that reason it seems to me I cannot better celebrate this 
kind of symbolic return than in bringing from the world 
which I have travelled, in all senses, to extol the glory of 
Rome, a reply, which involves one of the most disputed 
questions of modern culture. And it is this. Roman his- 
tory is inexhaustible, immortal, privileged, and never can 
it be too much rewritten, especially by those who are the 
children of Rome; especially by Italy, her eldest daughter; 
because it is complete and synthetic; because, when we em- 
brace in a glance the events of the centuries from the Punic 
wars to the final schism between the Orient and the Occi- 
dent, we observe, distended upon this immense panorama 
of two imposing social dissolutions and an imposing recom- 
position, that which we could almost define as the woof of 
universal history. 

How, in reality, does the history of Rome commence? 
Not by chaos, like the Biblical history of the universe, but 
by order; that is to say, by interior peace; by political dis- 
cipline ; by a well-established equilibrium of fortunes, all, 
moreover, modest, and almost all rooted in the soil. In all 
Italy, in the open country as in the towns, which have not 
yet forgotten their origins ; in the midst of the rural popula- 
tions as in the middle classes and the residue of the local 
noblesse; this peace, this discipline, this equilibrium, are 
maintained by means of laws, of religion, of munificence, 
of the half-divine prestige of victories, of a high reputation 
for wisdom, by the small aristocracy of Rome, which thence- 
forth reigns over the peninsula. It is a hereditary but not 
exclusive aristocracy; puritan and devout; avaricious and 
uncouth ; preoccupied only with having in its hands the most 
efficacious instruments of domination, . . . landed prop- 
erty, law, diplomacy, religion, government and soldiery; 
indifferent or defiant in regard to all else; to philosophy as 



ANCIENT ROME AND MODERN CULTURE 87 

to art; to Greek culture as to Asiatic creeds; to luxury as 
to enjoyment; resolved to seclude itself, with all the Italic 
races, which venerate it as an Olympus of demigods, in the 
ancient religion and the ancestral traditions; to confine 
Itself within the limits of that Italy which it has conquered 
with such severe toil, and, within those limits, to struggle 
against the destiny which impels it toward the empire of the 
world. The energy with which it resists destiny is great • 
but the moment arrives when the force of circumstances 
breaks down its resistance. What a change then ! From 
the second Punic war onwards the equilibrium of the ancient 
society changes under the action of the two most formidable 
revolutionary powers which in all ages, modify the face 
ot the world; new needs and new ideas. After the empire 
has extended beyond the seas, after its riches are increased 
after points of contact are multiplied with the refined civil- 
ization of the Hellenized East, there grow up, in all the 
social ranks, generations avid for facile gains; indocile 
aspiring to a wider and more gladsome existence, desiring 
a broader culture. Many ancient fortunes go down in the 
current of the new prodigality, many new fortunes arise 
f rom^ It. The aristocracy grows impoverished or depraved • 
or, disgusted, isolates itself in regret for the good old times ' 
or flings Itself into exoticism. And thus, Httle by little' 
the ancient moral unity disappears; the very foundations of 
the State are split. 

Everywhere, in religion, in the family, in the Republic 
discipline breaks down. The order of knights, puffed up 
by riches; the middle classes, invigorated by ambitions and 
embittered by poverty; revolt against the nobility revered 
for so many centuries; interests, which the power of a class 
sure of Its dominion no longer holds in check, engage in a 
fierce struggle among themselves, in the very heart of the 



88 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

State, and rend it more; little by little gold corrupts all; 
and, for the spoiling of that which gold has not the power 
to corrupt, there is suspicion ; the sombre pessimism which 
poisons souls ; so that there is nothing which is not, or which 
does not appear to be, incurably rotten. To the ancient 
social harmony there succeeds a furious scission of factions 
and coteries animated by bitter hatreds, each of which up- 
braids in the others its own vices. Greek culture pene- 
trates and diffuses itself easily in this society, already so 
disturbed by discords, distrust, and indiscipline ; but, at the 
same time as it refines or strengthens the intellects, it in- 
creases the disorder. Gusts of revolutionary fury pass over 
Rome and Italy; and to such an extent that, during the first 
twenty years of the century which precedes the Christian 
era, the pious republic of Camillus and Fabricius seems to 
dissolve into bankruptcy, anarchy, defeats; into the sense- 
less rage of dissensions, and, finall}^ into civil war. How 
many times, in these fatal years, did not even the most 
intrepid spirits fear that over this sacred hill, in that Forum 
where today, with a filial piety, we seek for the relics of 
those ages, there should pass, as over the ground where 
Carthage stood, the cukivators' plough, obliterating for ever 
the last vestiges of the nefarious and blood-soaked city ! 

A terrible man, Scylla, saves the Empire by recreating 
for it an army by dint of money and pillage; and restoring, 
with this army, by strength of terror, a rough social dis- 
cipline. But, once he has gone, and in proportion as the 
treasures of Mithridates, conquered by Lucullus, are trans- 
ported to Italy, the fever for sudden gains, the frenzy of 
luxury, the ambition for conquests, little by little breaks out 
again. For a moment this aged State seems to recover a 
fresh vigour. Pompey, following the example of Lucullus, 
conquers Syria; the dominant oligarchy wishes to enrich 



ANCIENT ROME AND MODERN CULTURE 89 

itself in the provinces and among foreign potentates; those 
who are not able to conquer an Empire levy contributions 
on the States and small principalities which tremble before 
the shadow of Rome; the courts of the petty Eastern kings, 
such as that of the Ptolemies at Alexandria, are invaded 
by ravenous knights and senators, who, after extorting 
money, return to spend it in Italy, where luxury makes rapid 
progress ; and, with luxury, debts ; and, with debts, the hel- 
lenistic and oriental cultures ; meanwhile, amid the incessant 
agitations of this age, there grows up and pursues his way 
the fatal man, Caesar. The day comes when finally this 
predestined man crosses the Alps and invades Gaul, bristling 
with forests and armies, to seek there glory and treasure. 
The State then falls into the power of parties, greedy, auda- 
cious, energetic, unscrupulous; but changeable as the inter- 
ests which they serve and of which they make use; and 
these parties, by their continual quick changes and restless, 
underhand dealings, corrode in the aged State the scanty 
discipline which Scylla had, with great difficulty, re-estab- 
lished. 

After thirty and more years of such a peace, barely toler- 
able and laboriously maintained, there recommences a civil 
war, or, to put it better, a frightful tempest which sweeps 
away first the remains of Scylla's constitution, then the 
dictatorship of Caesar, then the Senate and what survived 
of the Roman aristocracy, then the revolutionary trium- 
virate, as well as all other States, great and small, on the 
confines of the Empire, among them the throne of the 
Ptolemies. What remains standing? Ruins accumulate on 
all sides, men ask themselves if Rome be the greatest or the 
most wretched of cities. One of Rome's most lucid spirits, 
matured in the midst of these vicissitudes, discerns every- 
where a decadence which precipitates from bad to worse ; 



90 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

Aetas parentum, pejor avis, tulit 
Nos nequiores, mox laturos 
Protem vitiosiorem. 

And yet it is the last step towards the apogee. After 
this supreme ordeal the Greco-Oriental culture, which had 
disaggregated the ancient Italic society, transforms itself 
into a force of social reconstruction; it re-establishes little 
by little, in the Mediterranean basin, whose conquest has 
changed the situation, a fresh balance of interests, of aspira- 
tions, of ideas, of sentiments. Thanks to the peace, the 
barbarous West learns to till the land, to cultivate the woods, 
to sink mines, to navigate the rivers, to speak and write 
Latin both well and badly; it grows civilized, it purchases 
the products manufactured in the old cities of the East. In 
proportion as the new markets of the West afford it outlets, 
the East reopens the workshops of its industrious artisans 
and the busy shops of its traders; it once more sets in cir- 
culation its former traffic upon the roads extended by the 
sword of Rome. Thus the ancient oriental civilizations, 
Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, rejuvenate by contact with the 
young western barbarisms. Between them stands Italy, 
excellently placed to dominate this empire around the Med- 
iterranean, where the West balances the East; where Gaul, 
admirably developed since the century which follows the 
conquest, forms the counterpoise to Egypt, which has blos- 
somed forth again. For the first time the Mediterranean 
becomes as an immense and tranquil forum where, under 
Roman supervision, Europe, Africa and Asia come into 
contact, exchange their produce, their customs, their ideas. 
From this an easy peace originates, in Gaul, in Asia Minor, 
in Spain, in Northern Africa, — new middle classes, new 
provincial aristocracies; while at Rome the last remains of 
the old Roman aristocracy, of that aristocracy which, by 



ANCIENT ROME AND MODERN CULTURE 91 

tradition, occupied itself only with war and politics, ends 
by dying out. The new aristocratic families, recruited in 
the provinces, replace it. They have received a vigorous 
Roman education, they have sought to assimilate the ideas 
and manners of the old aristocracy of the Urhs. But the 
tendencies of the age make themselves felt; the military 
and political spirit declines in this new aristocracy; pre- 
occupations as to culture, administration, justice, urban civil- 
ization, a keen inclination towards Hellenism, grow and 
gather force. This is the reason why, by degrees, one fam- 
ily, which seems to fear its own fortune, is obliged to assume 
all the privileges and all the responsibilities shared during 
many centuries among numbers of noble families. We 
shall never understand the history of Rome if we do not 
understand that the Julia-Claudian family was obliged to 
assume and exercise, in spite of itself, a power which, in- 
sensibly, became monarchical, in the same way as the Roman 
nobility had been obliged to found, in spite of itself, the 
Empire of which it was afraid. 

There is summed up in this contradiction what might be 
called the philosophical essence of Roman history; since it 
was the destiny of Rome to perish through its conquests. 
It is, in fact, soon annihilated by the Empire it has founded. 
In proportion as the East flourishes once more and the West 
expands; in proportion as the prosperity, the number and 
the power of the middle classes and the provincial aristocra- 
cies increase; the immense Empire assumes the form, no 
longer cf a formidable engine of political and military do- 
minion, but of one of those highly refined urban States that 
Hellenism had produced in the East. Created by a puritan 
and strictly national aristocracy of diplomatists and war- 
riors, the Empire falls into the power of an aristocracy and 
bureaucracy, cosmopolitan, pacifist, lettered, philosophical; 



92 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

whose amalgamation is effected throughout the Empire, not 
any longer by a real or imaginary community of origins, 
traditions and history, but by a brilliant, though superficial, 
literary and philosophical culture, and by the political re- 
ligion of the Empire and the emperor. The force of co- 
hesion which internally binds together the enormous bulk of 
the Empire is no longer merely warfare and law; it is, 
above all, the urban civilization of the Hellenized East. 
In the same way as the Emperor at Rome, so do the rich 
families in the provinces dispense part of their wealth to 
beautify the cities; to increase the profits, the comforts and 
pleasures of the people; they build palaces, villas, theatres, 
temples, baths, aqueducts; they are liberal of corn, oil, 
amusements, money ; they endow public services or establish 
charitable foundations. The Empire is covered with great 
and small cities, which rival each other in splendour and 
beauty; all expand through the constant influx of the poor 
populations of the campaigns, of artisans, of peasants grown 
rich. Schools are opened wherein the young of the middle 
class, by learning rhetoric, literature, philosophy, and law, 
prepare themselves for the bureaucratic functions which, 
from generation to generation, increase and ramify. It is 
this lettered and philosophical bureaucracy which introduces 
into the Roman law, originally empiric, the philosophical 
and systematic spirit; which introduces into the adminis- 
tration, originally authoritative, the juridic spirit. And it 
is thus that, during the second century, the Empire displays, 
in the sunshine of the Pax Romana which illumines the 
world, its innumerable cities all resplendent with marbles. 
But, alas, for but a brief period ; for a fresh dissolution 
commences. The urban and cosmopolitan civilization which 
had linked, one with another, the various parts of this incon- 
gruous empire, begins, in the course of the third century, 



ANCIENT ROME AND MODERN CULTURE 93 

to act as a dissolvent force, which throws this briUiant 
world back into the chaos from which it had drawn it. 
Little by little, with the spontaneous growth of the cities 
and of their luxury, that which the urban civilization con- 
sumes, exceeds the fertility of the campaigns, and these 
become depopulated; drained by the cities which absorb 
their population and their wealth. What human force will 
ever drive from the cities the rural populations after they 
have once tasted the conveniences, the pleasures, and the 
vices, of a refined civilization? Hereafter the Empire is 
devoured alive by the cities which swarm upon its enormous 
body. To nourish the populations which there crowd to- 
gether; to amuse them and to dress them, the campaigns 
are harassed by a terrible fiscal regimen; agriculture is 
ruined; the material arts perish; finances break down; the 
administration falls into disorder; and soon the day will 
come when within the empire, by a monstrous inversion of 
the natural relations of things, the craftsmen of pleasure 
and luxury will multiply endlessly, while there will no 
longer be any peasants to till the fields, any bakers to make 
the bread, any sailors to plough the seas, any soldiers to 
defend the frontiers. It is the beginning of a social dis- 
solution, the history of which is not yet written; in the 
midst of which there supervenes the greatest moral fer- 
mentations the world has ever undergone for the mysticism, 
the cosmopolitanism, the antimiHtarism, the conflict which 
causes the old educated classes and the ancient Greco- 
Roman culture to clash with the barbarians, who invade 
the empire from without and from below, as well as the 
innumerable religious aberrations in formation; culminates 
in Christianity, which elaborates a superior morality, but 
whose spirit denies the very essence of the Empire; and 
destroys the vital substance of that ancient civilization. 



94 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

The Empire defends itself with the fury of despair, but 
without success. East and West separate, and the West, 
abandoned to itself, falls into decay. The greatest of the 
works of Rome, its empire of the West, covers with its 
ruins the immense territory which borders upon the Rhine 
and Danube; enormous ruins of fallen monuments, peoples 
returned to barbarism, arts abolished, languages forgotten, 
laws torn to pieces or mutilated, roads, villages, cities, oblit- 
erated from the face of the earth and reabsorbed by the 
primeval forest which, slow and tenacious, puts forth its 
shoots in this cemetery of a civilization, that covers the 
colossal bones of Rome. 



II 

Such is the tree which sprang from the little seed sown 
in this Roman soil. For centuries this tree has been felled. 
Why, then, do men yet come, from all parts, to dig with 
ardent curiosity in the place where it had its roots? Be- 
cause in none of the States which, in turn, predominated 
could the forces of dissolution and reconstruction, which 
make and unmake civilizations, operate during so long a 
series of centuries with so much liberty as at Rome, without 
being either retarded or accelerated by exterior perils and 
shocks. Because of this, Rome is truly a unique phenome- 
non in the history of the world. From the destruction of 
Carthage, until far on to the most calamitous period of its 
decadence, Rome had doubtless some severe alarms: yet 
she never experienced serious and lasting exterior dangers. 
Therefore she could yield herself to the operation of the 
internal forces which, from century to century, intervened 
to modify her; and for this reason her history is, as I have 
said, a complete history. It exemplifies how an empire is 



ANCIENT ROME AND MODERN CULTURE 95 

constituted and disintegrated; how a historic aristocracy 
is broken up, and how a democracy can perish of exhaus- 
tion ; by what internal processes a republic is converted into 
a monarchy; a military and national State transformed 
into a state of lofty culture, and little by little exhausts 
itself entirely in intellectuahsm, exoticism, humanitarianism, 
cosmopolitanism. It shows how an authoritative regime 
ends by gradually enchaining itself in a very complicated 
juridical system; it produces many revolutions and reac- 
tions; a great variety of repercussions of internal politics 
upon external, and conversely; we can there study to per- 
fection what is, perhaps, the most mysterious and the most 
disturbing of all historical phenomena; the violent moral 
repulsion which, especially at their first appearances, is 
aroused by the civilizations which, later on, matured or 
dead, are admired as the chefs d'oeuvres of the great 
peoples. Lastly, we see how a political religion is de- 
stroyed by a lofty literary and philosophical culture, and a 
new mystic religion arises which shapes itself from the 
debris of this same culture ; as well as all kinds of minglings, 
contacts, encounters and conflicts between young and old 
peoples; between ancient civilizations and barbarisms; be- 
tween different States, religions and laws. It would take 
too long were I to enumerate all the elements of universal 
history which this history of Rome presents, gathered to- 
gether as in a synthesis, and, for greater convenience, 
grouped around one centre which is Rome itself; whence 
it is sc easy to survey, in its ensemble, the immense pano- 
rama. But I do not think I exaggerate in stating that the 
history of Rome is complete and synthetic; and that, in 
her, all ages can discover something of themselves and 
behold themselves as in a mirror. 

Moreover, the history of modern civilization proves this. 



96 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

It is a well-known fact that, above all during the last three 
centuries, after powerful States had begun to reconstruct 
themselves upon the political compartition of the Middle 
Ages, Rome, its history, its literature, its military system, 
its legislation, were regarded as an historical mirage, pro- 
jected by the past in front of the generations which sought 
the road to the future. It has furnished different models 
to all generations for the resolution of the most opposite 
political problems. In the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
turies Rome is the example which all the great monarchies 
founded in Europe held before them ; in the eighteenth and 
nineteenth centuries the history of the Roman Republic, by 
the fervent cultus of Brutus, by the Scandalous romance of 
the Julii Claudii which Suetonius and Tacitus transmitted, 
fomented the opposition against absolute monarchy. After 
the French Revolution Rome once more supplied to mon- 
archy, as argument and means of persuasion, the Csesarean 
vindications of Drumann, Duruy, and Mommsen, and the 
panegyrics lavished on the imperial government. It may 
even be said that the most celebrated histories of Rome 
written in the nineteenth century were only written in view 
of the conflict which had begun between the republic and 
the monarchy. And it is precisely for this reason that, the 
struggle between these two political principles having grown 
weaker during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, 
not only have the histories of Rome so conceived grown 
antiquated, but many people are persuaded that the interest 
manifested up to that time in Roman studies has no longer 
any raison d'etre. " We live, they say, in the century of 
electricity and steam. The task of our age is to satisfy 
the middle and the popular classes, who want, not war and 
revolutions, but a more secure and agreeable existence. We 
ought to work indefatigably to create the prodigious riches 



ANCIENT ROME AND MODERN CULTURE 97 

which, alone, can satisfy the new desires of such numerous 
multitudes. An ancient history, wholly filled with military 
expeditions and political enterprises, is inevitably destined 
to become irrelevant to a century which needs machinery 
more than laws, chemists and physicians more than warriors 
and literary men. " To which they also add that Latin, 
which until the last century remained a half living language, 
finally died out in the nineteenth century, stifled by the 
luxuriant growth of national tongues and cultures, buried 
beneath the ruins of the political power of the Church which, 
in idiom as in many other things, had prolonged the Roman 
Empire. Is it not obvious that the death of the Latin 
language marks, for Rome, the beginning of a new, supreme 
and irreparable downfall? 

And, yet, when it was practically demonstrated that, even 
in the century of electricity and steam, it was an easy thing 
to reawaken the interest which formerly attached to Roman 
studies, many persons, to explain this phenomenon, attrib- 
uted it to the somewhat violent remodernization of it, . . . 
praiseworthy according to some, very reprehensible accord- 
ing to others . . . which I had accomplished. But those 
who are acquainted with Latin literature know that I have 
modernized Roman history far less than is asserted ; on the 
contrary, I have returned to an ancient point of view, the 
point of view from which Livy set out, and which, more- 
over, does not really belong to him, since it is common to 
many other writers of the same period. That history of 
Rome, which some have deemed so revolutionary, is already 
quite complete in embryo in the short preface that Livy has 
prefixed to his great work, regretting the simplicity and pur- 
ity of the old manners, tainted by the corruption which, little 
by little, invaded Rome. In analysing this doctrine of the 
" corruption " which so long absorbed the Roman mind, 



98 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

it is easy to discern in the three capital vices, avaritia, 
ambitio, luxuria, the continual increase of the needs and 
ambitions which, at the dawn of the twentieth century, 
condemn us all to work hard. The avaritia is the passion 
for gain ; the ambitio is what we call " arrivisme," the in- 
controllable pulsion by which all men strive to advance 
themselves to a position superior to that in which they were 
born ; the luxuria is the passion for ever increasing comfort, 
luxury, enjoyment. But if we thus disentangle the old 
doctrine of " corruption " from the moral and political 
prejudices with which it was charged for its contemporaries, 
the history of Rome, with all its revolutions, its wars and 
its conquests, . . . that immense history which, for so many 
centuries past, stands out before our civilization as a very 
marvel, is easily reduced to a phenomenon which each of 
us can understand without difficulty, since at this very 
moment this phenomenon surrounds us on all sides. That 
is why the century of electricity and steam, in looking 
through the glass adjusted twenty centuries ago by Sallust 
and Livy for less modem observers, is able not merely to 
cast its glance into the midst of that terrible and confused 
history, and discern its depth, but also to recognize itself 
therein. 

How many analogies, with its own existence, has not the 
age of steam and electricity met with, dispersed throughout 
that ancient history, which was believed to have become 
incomprehensible! It has found, for instance, some of the 
struggles to which parties give themselves up today in 
France ; certain horoscopes drawn in England of the des- 
tinies of the Empire and the fate of the debilitated aris- 
tocracy; the conflict, so keen in America, between the puritan 
tradition and the civilization of money. It has also, and 
above all, discovered the supreme law of the doom which 



ANCIENT ROME AND MODERN CULTURE 99 

hovers above its own head; that is to say, that implacable 
and mysterious irony of life which annihilates in their 
triumph all the supreme efforts of humanity; the tragic dis- 
illusionment of all the generations which have had the 
fortune or misfortune to live at a time when an historical 
era approaches its zenith, when a foreboding seizes them 
that the better their effort succeeds, the more useless it 
becomes. In the same manner as Rome was destroyed 
through her conquests, losing therein her military and politi- 
cal virtues, her very essence; so our civilization, grown 
capable of producing vast riches, thanks to a culture per- 
fected by centuries of labour, now destroys that culture 
little by little by burying its noblest features, its art, litera- 
ture, philosophy, religion and politics, under the illusion of 
new riches prematurely produced; by sacrificing, for the 
benefit of quantity appreciable by the gross evidence of 
number, the quality whose standards of measure can never 
be defined in an indisputable manner, and which, for that 
very reason, is a perpetual cause of discord at the same time 
as it is the sole source of true greatness. It has found, in 
short, in that ancient history, the subtle anguish that funda- 
mental contradiction brings into all the historical periods 
which approach their culminating point. Just as Rome 
suffered from altering her nature in her triumph, and be- 
lieved herself lost on the eve of her apogee, so do we always 
deem our riches more inadequate in proportion as they in- 
crease* by dint of wanting to make life pleasant and easy 
we encumber it intolerably with complications, responsibili- 
ties and duties ; by force of desiring to economize time and 
toil we reduce ourselves, among the innumerable occupations 
which encumber our life and spirit, to lacking even the time 
to remind ourselves of ourselves, and almost forget that 
we are men. 



100 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

III 

This is the torment, and perhaps also the expiation, of 
all the generations which flattered themselves that they had 
succeeded in creating a novel and unique destiny, greater 
and more beautiful than that of all the preceding genera- 
tions. No generation w^ould deserve to undergo this tor- 
ment more than our own. For this reason also, the history 
of Rome presents to us a reflection of our own lives, in 
spite of the centuries which separate us. This is the dis- 
tinguishing feature of Roman history, and the reason why 
all the children of Rome must not let it be banished. By 
classical studies and, consequently, by Roman studies, we 
have little by little set up an opposition to that practical 
and positive spirit deemed to be the highest virtue of our 
age. But upon what basis? For answer, it is sufficient to 
ask one question. Is it possible to imagine that the progress 
of the mechanical arts and chemical sciences may one day 
result in rendering statesmen, administrators, diplomatists, 
jurists, generals, educationalists, men of letters, philoso- 
phers, ministers of religion, of no use in the world? It is 
very clear that it does not suffice for men to dominate 
nature; they must also know how to influence the minds 
of their fellows. By the answer given to this question, the 
much disputed problem of classical studies is also settled, 
at least in principle. It is not the physical sciences, but 
only literature, history and philosophy which can serve as 
means of intellectual preparation for the elite whose func- 
tion it is, not to act upon matter, but to influence minds; 
not to exploit the forces of nature, but to regulate the inter- 
course of men. Hence it is not possible to conceive our 
civilization despoiled of its literary, historical and philo- 
sophical culture any more than it is possible to conceive a 



ANCIENT ROME AND MODERN CULTURE 101 

living being deprived of a vital organ. What is, indeed, 
the essential difference between these two states of his- 
torical development, which we call civilization and barbar- 
ism, if not this, that, in a civilized society, those who govern, 
who administer, who judge, are endowed with a lofty philo- 
sophical and literary culture; while in barbarous countries 
and epochs they accomplish their functions by conforming 
to old undisputed traditions, by referring to the simple pre- 
cepts of gross religions, supplementing what was lacking, 
by rude natural instincts or by blind passions? 

But if we admit this . . . and I do not see how we 
can refuse to admit it ... it is absolutely necessary to 
recogmze that, in the future as in the past, Rome will form 
an mtegral part of that lofty culture; unless, indeed the 
peoples who are its children, by an ill comprehended spirit 
of false modernity or an access of unhealthy exoticism, 
msist on razing to the very foundations the last remains 
of Its great history. Complete and synthetic, easy to 
adapt to all periods, as facts prove; agreeable to study ; vast, 
but not to such a degree that it exceeds the comprehensive 
forces of the human mind; this history is, in a way, a very 
distmct miniature or a very lucid sketch of universal history. 
It can thus serve, among modem peoples, as the crowning 
touch to the education of the upper classes which, every- 
where, ought to commence with the national literature and 
history. Let us not be discouraged by the transitory deca- 
dence of this intellectual tradition. If our century is pro- 
foundly materialistic, if it goes on dividing and subdividing 
Itself mto a great number of different peoples, languages 
and cultures, it will have yet more need of the common 
elements of culture uniting the elite of the civilized nations 
more deeply than in the momentary promiscuousness of 
sumptuous hotels; in the brief meetings of congresses or 



102 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

in the universal mania for flying over all the roads of the 
world in automobiles. The national principle is too deeply 
rooted in our civilization for it to be possible for the modern 
world, at least in a near future, to transform itself into a 
Cosmopolis; but it can not and ought not again to become 
a Tower of Babel where all the languages are confused. 
Therefore it also requires, if I dare say so, an ideal common 
language and universal elements of culture which can form 
so many links between the different peoples of Europe and 
America. Where are these universal elements to be found, 
now that religion has lost a part of its influence? Ancient 
Rome can yet offer us some of these, as is proved by this 
undeniable fact: the history of Rome, with that of France 
in the eighteenth century, and of the French Revolution, is 
the only one which is truly universal and everywhere read. 
That being so, is it necessary to employ many words to 
prove that the children of Rome have an interest in not 
suffering this privilege to be proscribed? So long as the 
history, the literature, the law of Rome, remain an integral 
part of the higher culture of Europe and America, we, Latin 
peoples, enjoy a kind of intellectual entailed estate; we 
oblige all the peoples of two continents to be tributaries of 
our culture ; we shall prolong for centuries, in the realm of 
ideas, that Roman Empire whose body has been reduced to 
dust. I do not ignore that our century hankers after em- 
pires more solid than these domains of the invisible, which 
cannot be measured, divided, enlarged, or exchanged. But 
if, in modem civilization, the higher culture is not destined 
to become the humble handmaid of finance and trade, never 
can that invisible empire be abandoned without detriment 
and shame by the peoples who have received it as a heritage 
from their fathers : all the more . . . and this is a consid- 
eration to which the practical spirit of the modem times 



ANCIENT ROME AND MODERN CULTURE 103 

ought not to be insensible ... it is not necessary, for its 
conservation, to have recourse to the force of arms and of 
money, nor to combine the efforts of peoples, institutions 
and parties, nor to risk perilous enterprises. It would 
suffice to reanimate, both in the State and in the intellectual 
classes, a profound, sincere and disinterested sentiment for 
the great Latin tradition, in place of the restless, capricious 
and litigious esoterism which rules there today. If the his- 
tory of Rome can perform this unique function in Euro- 
pean-American culture it is due to the fact that it is a perfect 
unit. But, if we break up this unit into a number of frag- 
ments, in what will these fragments differ, and how will 
they be distinguished, from the analogous fragments which 
make up the histories, more fragmentary and more unila- 
teral, of so many other peoples? In itself and by itself a 
Latin inscription is worth exactly as much as a Greek in- 
'scription or a Phenician inscription; a ruin of a Roman 
monument is worth exactly the same as a piece of a wall 
at Mycenae. Perhaps, even, the relics of Rome are worth 
less, since they are more abundant and relatively easy to 
discover. But, what is unique in the history of Rome is 
the plan that can be reconstructed from these materials. 
There is, then, a safe criterion for estimating the studies 
accomplished relative to Roman antiquity as well as to their 
tendencies; and it is this that, when the analysis is not an 
immediate preparation of the synthesis, it is a method un- 
duly transferred from the natural sciences to phenomena 
which do not permit of it; moreover, it is a vandalism and 
a sacrilege, a kind of destruction of Rome perpetrated upon 
the last intellectual remains of its vast empire. 

Indeed, if we seek the intellectual and inner reason, 
setting aside some external and social causes ivhich are," 
nevertheless, numerous and important, ... of the decay 



104 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

of classical studies, we shall find that it is due to the abuse 
of analysis, become an end unto itself both in literary and in 
historical studies. For motives it would take too long to 
set forth the studies of antiquity, which in the course of 
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, arose from the dis- 
solution of the old humanism, separated themselves more 
and more from art and philosophy, and, in the end, threw 
themselves wholly into the arms of science ; or, they thought 
to throw themselves there; for, in point of fact, they clasped 
only a shadow. The results of this error are manifest 
today. In the schools analysis, carried to an extreme, has 
given the death blow to Latin which was yet vegetating, a 
century ago; by substituting for the old humanist teaching 
a philological analysis, whose aridity has caused the younger 
generations to fling aside in disgust the most beautiful books 
of Rome. In the domain of history this excessive analysis, 
by arbitrarily distorting the phenomena, has strangely con- 
fused both the rules according to which the problems should 
be stated, and the methods which serve to solve them. It 
has invented many chimerical problems, and it has not seen 
the true ones. By its obstinate resolve to know too many 
details, it has often rendered incomprehensible even that 
which, in spite of the hiatuses, was relatively clear. Finally, 
it has obliged history to repudiate art, and has thus shut 
us out from those histories which at all epochs, by means of 
Thucydides, Polybius, through Livy, down to Francesco 
Guicciardini, had been one of the most forcible intellectual 
stimulants of all the aristocracies truly worthy to govern. 

IV 

Such are the reasons why I think that every man of true 
culture, jealous of the intellectual prestige of the Latin 



ANCIENT ROME AND MODERN CULTURE 105 

nations, should exert himself to draw forth the Roman 
studies from the silent cloisters of erudition, to bring them 
back to the midst of the life, the passions, the interests and 
the struggles of the world. Ancient Rome ought not to live 
only in the little coteries of scholars and archeologists. It 
ought to live in the soul of the new generations; project 
its immortal light upon the new societies which are arising. 
For, on the day when Roman history and its monuments 
become but dead materials, useful only for erudition, which 
would classify and catalogue them in museums beside the 
bricks of the palace of Khorsabad, the statues of the As- 
syrian kings and the relics of Mycenae, . . . the Empire of 
Rome which, as yet, is not entirely dead, would rejoin, in 
the Elysian Fields of history, the shades of the destroyed 
empires; would wander there beneath the cypresses in com- 
pany with the Babylonian Empire, the Egyptian Empire, the 
Carlovingian Empire ; and the Latin civilization would have 
to submit to a new disaster. 

Let us not prove unworthy of the singular historic for- 
tune we have inherited ; let us understand fully what there is 
that is rare, and even unique, in that ideal survival of an 
empire fallen so many centuries ago; and which, eliminated 
from the play of the interests of the world, yet lives in the 
system of moral forces which animate modern society; let 
us not listen to those who affirm that, henceforth, the sacred 
remains of ancient Rome can no longer serve but as sup- 
ports for the aeroplanes flying majestically above the silence 
of the Latin campagna. Let us try above all, — we who, 
for forty years past, have brought within the old circuit of 
the Aurelian walls the tools, the ideas and the interests of 
a quite recent civilization, — not to deserve the reproach 
that like new barbarians, we destroyed what survived of 
that Empire of Rome that the Church carried on, with vary- 



106 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

ing fortunes but without flagging, since the frightful catas- 
trophe of the Empire of the West. Roman tradition can 
flourish, a vigorous branch, upon the trunk of our civihza- 
tion, provided we do not obstinately resolve to cut it away ; 
provided that we apply ourselves to preserve to Roman 
studies that universal value which alone can render them 
an essential element of modern culture. It matters little 
if the other histories grow old; what is necessary, on the 
contrary, to Roman history, precisely because it serves to 
educate the new generations, is that it be renovated per- 
petually, not merely by incorporating in it the new facts 
discovered by erudition and archeology; not only by infusing 
into it a larger philosophical spirit and by applying to it 
the ripened experience of humanity ; but, above all, by work- 
ing to preserve for it, and to increase in it, that quality 
which is the highest in which a history, destined to be read 
and studied by all, can excel : to wit : human clarity. 

And, if such be the obligation which imposes itself upon 
all the devoted sons that Rome yet numbers in the world, 
it seems to me that, to conclude this discourse delivered on 
the anniversary date of the foundation of Rome, I could 
not do better than perform an act which will be in some 
sort a symbolic expiation addressed to the shade, so cruelly 
offended by the nineteenth century, of a man to whom the 
city owes, indeed, some gratitude since it owes him its 
existence ; I mean to say, to resuscitate Romulus. We know 
in what a mystical penumbra the Natale Urbis is enveloped. 
What beginning had the fabulous greatness of this city? 
In all the centuries men would have been glad to rend this 
mysterious veil. But, century and century, we were con- 
tent to repeat a legend, full of poetry, although a little con- 
fused, wherein miracles and wonders surrounded the cradle 
of the city. Generations and generations had cursed the 



ANCIENT ROME AND MODERN CULTURE 107 

villainous Amulius, lamented the unfortunate Numitor and 
poor Rhea Sylvia, cherished the good Faustulus, meditated 
on the shade of the Figtree Ruminal, caressed in imagina- 
tion the maternal wolf and saluted the kindly woodpecker 
who descended to nourish, and shelter under her wings, the 
predestined twins. That this tale was a tissue of fables 
the ancients had understood ; but they had respected its out- 
line, at first from civic devotion, afterwards through a reli- 
gious respect yielded to old traditions, and finally because 
they were incapable of substituting another more exact ac- 
count. Man must so often resign himself not to know! 
But then comes on the scene the terrible nineteenth century 
which claims to know everything, believes itself capable of 
discovering everything; and seizes in its rough hands this 
tissue of fables, tears it, unravels it, persuaded that it will 
find the truth among the separated threads; reduces it so 
thoroughly to ravellings that, finally, what remains in its 
hands is no more than an inextricable medley of dead ma- 
terial. The ancient fable has vanished with all its per- 
sonae ; the woodpecker has flown back into the sky ; the she- 
wolf has retired into the forest; Romulus himself, the re- 
vered and deified founder of the city, is now no more than 
a name; and all that remains in place of the legend is a 
tenebrous void sounded in vain by ingenious historians with 
the long measuring rods of hypothesis, without their suc- 
ceeding in finding therein a single rag of truth ! 

And yet, since Rome has existed, it is clearly necessary 
that it must have had a beginning intelligible to the human 
mind. Now, may there not be in the ancient fable a gleam 
of intelligible truth? After one has cut away from the 
legend the poetry which enfolds and impregnates it, it seems 
to me that it stands up as a sufficiently trustworthy and sub- 
stantial, although very summary, account; that is would 



108 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

say that Rome was a colony of Alba whence a part of the 
population of that old city swarmed from the mountain 
towards the sea. The city of Rome did not originate, then, 
from a small village which grew, little by little, by favour 
of circumstances. It was a city founded at one stroke, by 
an act of personal volition, according to a studied design, 
in an intentionally chosen place; a city which was, in con- 
sequence, endowed from the first with an already mature 
religious and military and political institutions, since, on 
the one hand, they had undergone, in another more ancient 
city, the test of long experience ; and on the other they had 
doubtless been adapted with discretion to the peculiar con- 
ditions of the new creation. 

In short, this was a city which was bom grown-up, like 
certain cities which are founded today in America; it was, 
from its very beginnig, a new city with an old culture. 
This explains both its marvellous position in Latium, upon 
a river, between the sea and the mountains, and the exact 
account that the ancients kept of the date of its founda- 
tion; its sudden and bold entry into history, and the rapid- 
ity of its development. But if Rome was created in this 
manner, it could be founded only by one or several leaders 
who selected its site and who ordered all its plans with 
wisdom. Obviously this leader was a great man. And 
since a founder was necessary to found Rome, what reason 
have we to deny that the founder was this Romus or Romu- 
lus of whom ancient tradition speaks? As I am accused 
of so many grave misdeeds by modem criticism, I ac- 
knowledge myself still further guilty of admitting that 
the scanty knowledge we possess as to the origin of Rome 
is contained entirely in the ancient tradition; and that, to- 
wards the middle of the eighth century b. c. a prince of the 
family which reigned at Alba came, for motives which 



ANCIENT ROME AND MODERN CULTURE 109 

the legend allows us with difficulty to guess, into this cir- 
cuit of hills, and founded upon the Palatine a little city 
which he launched into eternity. 



I say that he launched it into eternity : for it is yet possi- 
ble to attribute to Rome the glory of being eternal without 
falling into the pompous hyperboles of decadent rhetoric, 
if we mean thereby that what has rendered complete the 
history of Rome is the synthetic effort, the labour long sus- 
tained to balance all the parts of its civilization into a har- 
monious and proportioned unity; if we add that, thanks 
to these characteristics, its literature, its law, its history will 
be eternally the models upon which all the peoples who 
desire to make of their own history a harmonious synthesis, 
a complete whole which recommends itself by clarity, by 
order and by noble proportions, will keep their eyes fixed. 
The finest example of this in modem times is France, the 
nation which, unquestionably, has created the greatest his- 
tory of the last centuries. Profoundly imbued with the 
classic spirit, France alone has succeeded, among all Euro- 
pean nations , . . and, moreover, has accomplished it, like 
ancient Rome, at the cost of formidable crises ... in cre- 
ating a complete civilization, wherein, as in Roman history, 
everything is found, although in a more restricted lapse of 
time: trade and agriculture, aristocracy and democracy, the 
monarchy and the republic, the higher culture and war, 
art and law, philosophy and religion, revolution and tradi- 
tion, the interior effort after liberty and the exterior effort 
for expansion, all the practical interests and all the ideal 
aspirations. If it is understood in this sense, the eternity 
of Rome is a conquest which, gained over time, ought 



110 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

ceaselessly to recommence. For if civilization, in its most 
perfect expansion, is a synthesis of opposed forces, these 
syntheses are only prepared by long periods in which the 
sentiment of vital unity is lost, and in which men neither 
understand nor admire the circumstantial phenomena of 
history. Now, without doubt, we live in times when the 
world is becoming daily more unbalanced in her too greatly 
augmented bulk. We witness the final demolition of a 
society created on the ruins of the ancient world by Chris- 
tianity ; at that demolition which Humanism and the Refor- 
mation had begun, which the science and philosophy of the 
seventeenth century have continued, which the French 
Revolution was to accelerate by its tremendous impetus 
and which is consummated in our century with a furious 
ardour, by the progress of industry and commerce, the uni- 
versal mania for making money, and the extraordinary 
development of America. From this immense revolution 
of history in the midst of which we live, from this supreme 
dissolution of an order of things so ancient and venerable, 
monstrous creatures are everywhere being born : States half 
barbarous and half corroded by the vices of the most de- 
crepit civilizations; enormous and shapeless cities; armies 
which grow inordinately in spite of the rapid decadence of 
the military spirit; fabulous riches which accumulate with- 
out other object than their own increase ; gigantic industries 
which are no longer upheld by the natural stay of agricul- 
ture; philosophies divorced from practice and dying of 
asphyxia in an atmosphere too rarified by purely intellectual 
preoccupations; sciences which dive so deep into the prac- 
tical that they are suffocated by it; arts and literatures 
which claim to be their own origin and to have come into 
the world without fathers or ancestors. 

There is, then, no occasion to be surprised that, in a 



ANCIENT ROME AND MODERN CULTURE 111 

period unbalanced to this point, the nations which, Hke 
France, have succeeded in effecting a Roman synthesis of 
their various parts, are obhged, to maintain it, to make 
efforts daily more laborious; and that all the Latin world, 
Italy included, more and more lose confidence in its great 
intellectual tradition and daily inclines more to take dis- 
order for strength, confused obscurity for profundity, in- 
coherent extravagance for originality, wealth and its in- 
creasing mass as the sign of the greatness of peoples. 
There is no occasion to be surprised, perhaps; but there is 
indeed occasion profoundly to regret it. If then the world, 
in growing, and becoming complicated beyond measure, 
seems to flee from the synthetic and harmonic power of the 
Latin genius to fling itself into a delirious orgy of huge 
and disorderly forces, it is but the more urgent for us, the 
sons of Rome, to strain all our energies in order to subju- 
gate to the harmonic genius of our race this horrible and 
imposing chaos of blind forces. If all civilization be a syn- 
thesis of opposite forces, the confusion of modem society 
must some day find a more beautiful and wiser equilibrium. 
What an error it would be, and how could posterity pardon 
our generation and those which shall follow ours, if we 
should let venerable traditions of social order and intel- 
lectual discipline perish at the very hour when these tradi- 
tions, rejuvenated in conformity to the spirit of the times, 
could be of the greatest use to the world by reason of their 
co-ordinating virtues; the tradition which is summed up in 
the word " Rome " so often repeated during these twenty- 
seven centuries, and with such various feelings ; at the sound 
of which I have yet been able, in this twentieth century, . . . 
and it will be the most precious memory of my life, . . . 
to see almost two continents vibrate with admiration and 
gratitude ! 



CHAPTER IV 
Italy's Foreign Policy 



IT.\LY'S FOREIGN POLICY 

I 

Os the evening of Febnian." 29th, 1896. General Baratieri, 
the commander-in-chief of the Italian army in Abyssinia, 
left Sauria with all the troops at his disposal — about 
15,000 — in order to carry out a manoeuvre whose object is 
still unknown. This movement proved disastrous. After 
marching all night, the little army lost its way in the laby- 
rinth formed by the Raio and Abba Garima ; it split up into 
three sections which lost touch with each other and was 
surprised by 100,000 Abyssinians, armed with excellent 
rifies. About 8,000 men fell, 2.000 were taken prisoners; 
the remainder escaped as best they could, abandoning their 
guns. 

Unfortunate as it was, this defeat was after all only a 
set-back. Only four Itahan brigades had taken part in 
the battle of Adowa but the check came upon the country 
at a moment of discouragement and anxiety. Italy had for 
some years been passing through a serious economic crisis 
and the pessimism which was the result of this crisis was 
aggravated by political dissensions. Crispi. who had been 
in power for two years, had not given the country a mo- 
ment's peace. Sicily and the Lunigiana had been placed 
under martial law in order to repress disturbances as to the 
gravit}- of which opinions differed : whilst conflicts had been 
provoked both in Parliament and the country by the perse- 
cution of the Socialist party whose progress had alarmed 
the upper classes and by the increased taxation proposed by 
the government at this critical time and the conquests and 

115 



116 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

annexations made by General Baratieri in Abyssinia. The 
wide-spread irritation had been further increased by various 
scandals. The African policy was especially unpopular in 
a country which had never been used to overseas campaigns. 
All these causes turned a mere colonial incident into a dis- 
aster whose consequences were both complex and profound. 
The whole history of Italy up to the outbreak of the Euro- 
pean war, was, as it were, haunted by the sinister memory 
of this set-back, which had impressed the nation as an ir- 
reparable defeat. 

As soon as the news became known, the country was 
shaken by anger to its very depths. The Ministry was 
forced to resign, so as to avoid the storm which it had not 
the strength to resist. King Htunbert called upon the Mar- 
chese di Rudini, a great Sicilian nobleman and the leader of 
the Opposition, to form a Cabinet. Rudini was a man of 
wide intelligence but not sufficiently resolute. He decided 
not to attempt to avenge the Italian defeat, which would 
have been an enterprise fraught with difficulty for geo- 
graphical reasons; he concluded a peace with Emperor 
Menelik and endeavoured to quiet the people by putting an 
end to the persecution of the Socialists, and coming to an 
understanding with the parliamentary representatives of the 
Radical party which voiced the wishes of the lower and 
middle classes. The Socialist deputies were at this time 
but few in number. Di Rudini did not succeed in winning 
the confidence of the masses but only in annoying the Court 
and the upper classes. The masses, who realized that de- 
feat had weakened the government, expressed their dissat- 
isfaction with an audacity which struck terror into the 
hearts of the Court and conservative parties, who had for 
some time been haunted by dread of a revolution. Ere 
long the Socialists accused Di Rudini of tyranny because he 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 117 

would n6t accede to all their demands ; whilst at Court and 
in the lobby s of the Chamber and the Senate it was whis- 
pered that he had come to an understanding with the 
Radicals and Socialists in order to set up a republic. Di 
Rudini tried to make the best of this impossible situation 
which had been brought about by the irritation of one party 
and the fears of the other, but after two years the catas- 
trophe could no longer be warded off. The failure of the 
crops in 1898 provoked riots all over Italy, which began 
in the south and took on a more and more political char- 
acter as they spread northwards. At the beginning of May 
violent popular disturbances broke out in Milan, a city 
which was always a source of anxiety to official circles. 
The Socialists and Radicals were stronger in Milan than in 
any other town and the Republicans, too, exercised consid- 
erable influence, while the lower and middle classes had 
always affected a certain indifference to the monarchy. 
Milan had moreover always been obstinately opposed to 
Crispi and his African policy. When Rome learnt that 
riots had begun at Milan there was a repetition of the phe- 
nomenon which had taken place after the battle of Adowa. 
On that occasion a colonial set-back had been regarded as 
an irreparable defeat. Now agitations which could have 
been easily suppressed by an energetic police force took on 
the dimensions of a revolution in the eyes of the upper 
classes. Panic broke out in official circles and spread over 
the whole country. The troops were ordered to fire with- 
out hesitation. Hundreds of persons were killed or 
wounded both in Milan and other cities. Martial law was 
proclaimed at Milan and elsewhere. The Di Rudini Cabi- 
net resigned and was succeeded by General Pelloux, a 
native of Savoy, who inaugurated a policy of violent perse- 
cution of the three parties of the extreme Left — the Social- 



118 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

ists, the Republicans and the Radicals. Deputies, journal- 
ists and prominent members of these three parties were ar- 
rested, brought before courts martial and sentenced to five, 
ten and even fifteen years of penal servitude. 

Such a reaction could not last and before long the coun- 
try realized the injustice of these sentences and a fresh 
series of agitations began vi^ith the object of obtaining a 
general amnesty. The government made certain important 
concessions to public opinion on the subject, but at the same 
time tried to introduce laws limiting the hberty of the press 
and the right of holding public meetings and forming asso- 
ciations. A group of deputies of the Right and Centre, 
headed by Sonnino, supported these measures vigorously, 
on the ground that it was absolutely necessary to defend 
the State against the rebellious spirit of the masses; while 
the Radical, Republican and Socialist deputies organized 
obstructive tactics against these proposals on the ground 
that it was necessary to defend the cause of liberty. The 
struggle grew more and more acute and developed, or ap- 
peared to develop, into a conflict between the reactionary 
party and the champions of liberty, for, three years after 
the battle of Adowa, the government had not the requisite 
authority to break down the opposition to its restrictive 
measures. The three parties of the extreme Left, which 
knew that they had the country with them, succeeded in 
placing the Cabinet in such an awkward position that it was 
forced to dissolve the Chamber. The three parties then 
made common cause and obtained one hundred seats at the 
general election which took place in June, 1900, whereas 
in the old Chamber they had never held more than fifty. 

This general election was looked upon as the defeat 
of the reactionary government. Pelloux resigned and the 
King called upon Saracco, an old Piedmontese senator who 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 119 

was supposed to hold liberal views, to form a new Cabinet. 
Saracco formed some sort of Ministry and the newly elected 
Chamber adjourned. This was in July. Every one was 
well aware that Saracco's Cabinet was merely a stop-gap 
and that the decisive struggle between reactionaries and 
liberals would begin in November. The situation was ex- 
tremely difficult and obscure, all the more so because the 
King and the Court, whose prestige had suffered consider- 
ably through the battle of Adowa, had been still further 
compromised in popular opinion by the recent reactionary 
policy. It was, moreover, obvious that no government 
would be strong enough to carry out a systematic persecu- 
tion of the Socialists, Republicans and Radicals. But was 
the King likely to wish or be able to carry out any policy 
differing from that which had hitherto met with his ap- 
proval? Would he, or could he, throw off all the influ- 
ences which urged him to a death struggle with the parties 
of the extreme Left? This uncertainty troubled the whole 
political world and still further complicated a situation which 
in itself was far from simple, when fate solved the problem 
in a manner both unexpected and tragic. On July 29th King 
Humbert was present at some sports near Monza. At nine 
in the evening he left the grounds to return to the royal villa. 
Just as he was standing up in his open carriage to return the 
greetings of the crowd, a man who had got up on a chair a 
couple of yards off, as if to get a better view of the sovereign, 
pointed his revolver and fired upon the King, who sank back, 
mortally wounded. 

II 

It was under such circumstances that Victor Emmanuel 
III ascended the throne. Curiously enough, he was unpop- 



120 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

ular with the people. He was supposed to have chosen the 
German Emperor as his model and to intend to make war, 
persecute the Socialists and govern with an iron hand. 
Fortunately all these rumours proved utterly unfounded. 
Parliamentary circles quickly discovered that the atmos- 
phere of the Court had undergone a complete change. The 
elections of 1900 and the assassination of King Humbert 
had afforded people food for thought. All of these causes 
tended to bring about a speedy reaction. The Chamber, of 
which the majority had after all been elected in order to 
support a Cabinet which proposed to introduce laws limit- 
ing the liberty of the press and the right to hold public 
meetings, and form associations, suddenly saw the error of 
its ways and brought about the fall of the Saracco Cabinet 
on the ground that it had illegally dissolved a workmen's 
syndicate at Genoa. The King then turned to Zanardelli, 
who formed a liberal Cabinet. Once the King and the gov- 
ernment had become liberal, conversions in the press, in 
Parliament and in the official world became startlingly fre- 
quent. In a few months not a trace was left of the reac- 
tionary policy of recent years, which was abjured by all, 
with the exception of Sonnino and a small group of faithful 
disciples, prominent amongst whom was Salandra, who had 
been a member of the Pelloux Cabinet. 

The man, however, on whom all eyes were fixed when 
the new Cabinet made its appearance before the Chamber, 
was not Zanardelli, but his Minister for the Interior, Gio- 
litti, who had been Prime Minister in 1892, when he had 
tried to form a great " Liberal " or " Progressive " minis- 
try. In this he had failed. At the end of 1893, when he 
resigned, the exchange was at 18% ; Sicily in a state of 
revolt ; the finances in disorder, public opinion depressed by 
the scandal of the Banca Romana and convinced that Italy 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 121 

was on the verge of bankruptcy and revolution, and that 
Giohtti alone was responsible for the whole catastrophe. 
This view was exaggerated. Giolitti's ministry had un- 
doubtedly made serious blunders, the gravest of all being 
one of which it was never publicly accused — that of sup- 
plying Emperor Menelik with two million cartridges, but 
the condition of the country at the time of its resignation 
was due to pro founder causes than the blunders of the 
Giolitti ministry. None the less the people revenged it- 
self for all it had suffered by accusing Giolitti of having 
brought Italy to the very brink of ruin and he had become 
so thoroughly unpopular that for years he could not attempt 
to speak in the Chamber. People even got into the habit 
of speaking of him as if he were dead ! 

The curiosity aroused by this political resurrection is 
therefore readily understood. Giolitti's influence moreover 
steadily increased both in the Cabinet and in Parliament 
and obliterated the memories of the past. He surprised all 
political parties by a complete and sudden change of front 
towards the working classes and the parties of the extreme 
Left. Hitherto the government had endeavoured to pre- 
vent strikes by all the means which a suspicious and obscure 
legislation, interpreted in accordance with the known wishes 
of industrial magnates, put at its disposal. Giolitti allowed 
the first strikes which took place after he came into office 
to take their natural course ; in certain cases he even ordered 
the authorities to assume a benevolent attitude towards the 
workmen. The Socialists were of course delighted, but 
strikes became steadily commoner and the consequent re- 
monstrances of the manufacturers and employers more con- 
sta-nt. Giolitti held firm and, when his policy was discussed 
in the Chamber, declared plainly that the workmen had the 
right to strike in the defence of their interests and that the 



122 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

State must remain strictly neutral. It was a revolution on 
a small scale. In the division on this debate, Socialists, 
Republicans and Radicals voted for the government, thus 
ensuring it a majority in the House and bringing about a 
radical change in the relations between the government and 
the parties of the extreme Left. On the Right a group of 
deputies, headed by Sonnino and Salandra, passed over to 
the Opposition, on the ground that the government was 
compromising the authority of the State. At the same time 
a split took place in the three parties of the extreme Left. 
In each of these parties the majority asked for nothing bet- 
ter than to carry the possibilist policy to its logical end, 
while the minority protested against these attempts to turn 
the party into a government party. The struggle between 
the two tendencies was especially violent in the Socialist 
party which split up into two factions: the Revolutionary 
and the Reformist. 

Giolitti finally found himself, like the Marchese di Rudini 
before him, between the Socialists, who accused him of a 
hypocritical change of front, and the Conservatives, who 
accused him of flirting with revolution. This position, 
which had been Di Rudini's weak suit, proved Giolitti's 
trump card. Times had changed. The Court was no 
longer hostile to Liberalism, whilst even in the conservative 
ranks there were many who recognized that Giolitti's meth- 
ods, while not without their drawbacks, were more suc- 
cessful than Pelloux's policy had been. Moreover the 
economic crisis of 1890-1900 was now a thing of the past. 
An era of prosperity had begun, and this prosperity lulled 
much discontent to rest and turned the energy of many 
people in other than political directions. The simultaneous 
attacks made upon Giolitti actually strengthened his posi- 
tion. If the extremists of both Right and Left attacked 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 123 

him, it was argued that he must represent the happy medium, 
and in spite of various untoward incidents his influence 
steadily increased during 1901, 1902 and 1903 and when, 
in the autumn of 1903, Zanardelli resigned on the ground 
of old age and ill health, the King entrusted Giolitti with 
the formation of a new Cabinet. The Ministery of 1893 
was definitely relegated to limbo and Giolitti was avenged. 
He formed his second Cabinet and to the general surprise 
appointed Tittoni, the Prefect of Naples, who had hitherto 
taken no active interest in politics, Minister for Foreign 
Affairs. 

Ill 

Once Giolitti had regained his position, his one idea was 
to place it on a sure basis. If we are to understand his 
policy and his success, we must understand the working 
of the parliamentary system. The Chamber is composed 
of 508 deputies, elected by the votes of the district. Of 
these 508 " electoral colleges," as they are called in Italy, 
there are perhaps 200 in which the deputies are elected by 
organized political parties. In the remainder, the deputies, 
though taking their seats in the Chamber on "the Right, Left, 
or in the Centre, as the case may be, do not represent any 
definite political creed. Their organization being either 
excessively feeble or altogether lacking, the candidates are 
chosen and supported by rival -cliques, having no political 
character and quite unable to carry off the victory without 
assistance. In these " electoral colleges " the decisive fac- 
tor of success is almost always government support. 

It is, therefore, possible for the Prime Minister in power 
at the time of a general election — provided he be also 
Minister of the Interior — to create a personal party in 
^hese " electoral colleges " which will return deputies whose 



lU EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

only political program is the support of the man to whom 
they owe their election. It is also clear that if a statesman 
were in power during several general elections, this personal 
party might easily become the preponderating element in 
the system. This happened in Giolitti's case. The first 
elections during his term of power in the reign of Victor 
Emmanuel III took place in 1904 and brought him in a rich 
harvest. He succeeded not only in creating for the first 
time a staunch and powerful personal party by making full 
use of every means of administrative pressure within his 
reach, but, owing to the circumstances under which Parlia- 
ment had been dissolved, in gaining the support of many 
Conservatives without breaking with the Extreme Left, 
who had lost twenty seats owing to the public irritation 
caused by a general strike which had taken place just before 
the dissolution of Parliament. This election added im- 
mensely to his prestige and it was soon rumoured in parlia- 
mentary circles that the King wished general elections 
should henceforth take place under Giolitti's auspices. 
This rumour, though false, was quite as useful to Giolitti 
as if it had been true, and established his power on a firm 
basis. The three general elections which have taken place 
during the reign of Victor Emmanuel III have all been 
during Giolitti's terms of office as Prime Minister and Min- 
ister of the Interior, 

Giolitti thus was able to strengthen his party and graft 
on to parliamentary institutions a curious system of personal 
government. The keystone of the whole system was of 
course the fact of his being in power at the time of general 
elections. The fear of a dissolution of Parliament, which 
is entirely in the hands of the King, was therefore, Giolitti's 
most formidable weapon for the maintenance of the fidelity 
of his majority. The dissolution of Parliament is not, 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 125 

however, a weapon which can be constantly used, since the 
Chamber cannot be dissolved within a month after its elec- 
tion. During the first two years of a new legislature Gio- 
litti's authority over his party and the Chamber as a whole 
was of necessity weaker and the Chamber could more easily 
show signs of independence. Giolitti got over this difficulty 
by on each occasion resigning a few months after the gen- 
eral election. He carried out this manoeuvre in the spring 
of 1905, towards the close of 1909, and in the spring of 
1914. But if during the first two years of its existence the 
Chamber was intractable even with the author of its being, 
it can readily be imagined that it was still more so in the 
hands of a locum tenens. Hence this interim government 
was invariably weak and fell into general disfavour in a 
year or fifteen months. Giolitti's friends brought about its 
fall and Giolitti formed a new Cabinet. Two years had 
passed of the five which make up the legal life of a legis- 
lature and the deputies were already beginning to think about 
the next general election. Timor mortis initium sapientiae. 
The Chamber became tractable once more and Giolitti re- 
mained in power until the general election. 

This ingenious game was accompanied by a process of 
attrition applied to the political parties represented in Par- 
liament, of which there are five: the Clerical; the Sonnino 
group, which may be termed Conservative; the Radicals; 
the Republicans and the Socialists, who are now divided 
into two groups — Official and Reformist. Each party is 
represented by from twenty to fifty deputies and is therefore 
too small to act alone, while coalitions between parties are 
very difficult on account of their numerous differences. At 
the head of his personal party Giolitti was able to Induce all 
these parties, with the exception of a few obstinate individ- 
uals, either to give him their support or to form an opposi- 



UG EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

tion which would do him no harm. How was any othef 
state of things possible? The opposition of any one of 
these* parties, standing alone, was powerless and coalitions 
were never a success. Giolitti's Cabinet, moreover, did its 
utmost to conciliate every one and to content all parties and 
shades of opinion, however contradictory. It gave the 
Socialists liberty to form syndicates and turn the railways 
into State concerns, while at the same time granting the 
great industries all the privileges and all the protection they 
demanded and guaranteeing the landed proprietors the in- 
tangibility of the import duty on cereals. It increased the 
stipends of the clergy and showed itself favourable to Cler- 
ical influence in the schools, whilst choosing influential 
Free Masons as Ministers of Public Instruction. In order 
to please the masses it reduced the term of military service 
to two years, refrained from imposing higher taxes and 
gave up all schemes for colonial extension, whilst at the 
same time increasing both army and navy to please the 
upper classes and the Conservatives. It allowed its officials 
to form syndicates, threaten to go on strike and do their 
utmost to shake off the authority of the ministers, and even 
rewarded these proceedings with a rise of salary. It al- 
lowed Italy to get on better terms with France without 
breaking off the Triple Alliance. It had adopted the prin- 
ciple of yielding always and at once to any fairly decided 
manifestation of public opinion or to anything which ap- 
peared to be such a manifestation, while prepared to with- 
draw the concession the moment public attention was 
directed elsewhere. Almost heroic strength of mind and 
even cruelty would have been needed to attack such an oblig- 
ing government. Such principles will no doubt seem 
strange to most people and, as a matter of fact, the system 
of which it was an example has almost disappeared in 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 127 

Europe, but similar governments have been common enough 
in the past and in other continents. Caesar and Augustus 
went upon the same plan: the former in order to achieve 
the conquest of Gaul, the latter in order to reorganize the 
Empire. There are other interesting analogies in the his- 
tory of Florence and in that of the South American Repub- 
lics. Such a system is, moreover, the necessary outcome 
of an electorate which is not dominated by properly organ- 
ized political parties. Sooner or later some individual, 
family, or group of families, will take possession of the 
electoral system and work it for their private ends. This 
system, moreover, put into practice for ten years in Italy by 
an intelligent, adroit time-server, endowed with a clear head 
and a firm will, could not fail to produce remarkable re- 
sults. It enabled Italy to benefit by the period of prosperity 
which the world enjoyed after 1900; it eliminated a certain 
number of abuses from the legislation and the administra- 
tion; and it checked the antidynastic movement which had 
gained ground during the last years of King Humbert's 
reign. Nor must it be forgotten that it was under this 
government and in part due to its efforts that an historic 
event of considerable importance took place: the shifting of 
the pivot of power from the aristocracy and the upper mid- 
dle classes to the intelligentia, the lower middle classes and 
the masses. The dogged struggle between the parties of 
the Extreme Left and the other political parties which went 
on during the whole period of Giolitti's power was in 
reality a struggle for power between the wealthy and middle 
classes. This is not the place to discuss whether this shift- 
ing of power has been for good or evil. In any case it is 
an event of considerable historical importance, which must 
be due to profound causes, since it is a universal phenome- 
non. We must not forget that the Prussian aristocracy 



128 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

thrust Germany into the European War for the express 
purpose of delaying this shifting of power in Germany. 
Giolitti did much to further this movement with his system 
of personal government by supporting to the utmost the 
demands and wishes of the middle classes. 

There is, however, the reverse side of the medal to be 
considered. The system had many drawbacks. Whatever 
its merits, this personal government acted under the cloak 
of parliamentary institutions and this contradiction between 
substance and form could hardly fail to produce serious 
results. Discussions, divisions, parties, the formation and 
fall of ministries, the interaction of majorities and minori- 
ties and the elections, everything in fact which forms the 
essence of the true parliamentary system, became under this 
kind of government more or less thinly disguised fictions, 
serving merely to give a legal sanction to proceedings most 
of which were decided upon without reference to the will 
of either parliament or the electors. At the same time all 
political parties found themselves in a false position forced 
as they were to adduce principles as a reason for conduct 
which was in reality more often than not determined by a 
policy of parliamentary bargaining. The Socialists were 
in the most awkward position of all. The Electors, who 
understood nothing of these complicated intrigues, regarded 
their deputy, who, while in Rome, was on excellent terms 
with Giolitti, as the representative of the masses and the 
champion of social revolution. In proportion as he became 
more and more opportunist and possibilist in Rome, the 
Socialist deputy had to redeem his backsliding by becoming 
more and more revolutionary in his speeches to his con- 
stituents, or at Monte Citorio on great occasions, when his 
constituents were keeping a watch on his words and actions. 

While there were many who found this state of things 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 129 

quite congenial, others regarded it as both dangerous and 
objectionable. One phenomenon especially proved a source 
of irritation : the decadence of Parliament. It is an indis- 
putable fact that both the Chamber and the Senate are of 
less value today than twenty years ago. In the Chamber 
there was formerly a small, by no means united, but very 
influential circle, which has almost entirely disappeared and 
been replaced by a herd of provincial attorneys, idle and 
intriguing university professors, professional politicians of 
the lowest order and wealthy men who regard a seat in 
Parliament as a rung on the social ladder. This decadence 
is even more serious in the Senate, whose members are all 
chosen by the King, — i.e. : the government. In old days the 
Senate was a close but select body. By filling it with the 
dregs of the intellectual and academic world, it has been 
turned into a centre of intrigue which the public refuses to 
take seriously. Giolitti's government undoubtedly did 
much to bring about this decadence, for, like all personal 
governments, its main object was to fill the two chambers 
with devoted and reliable adherents of no great intelligence, 
many of whom were easily to be found in those middle 
classes with which it was so anxious to stand well. To this 
serious defect must be added the debilitating effect on the 
State of the habitual weakness of the government when 
confronted by public opinion. The government's policy of 
yielding to every fairly decided manifestation of public 
opinion and of withdrawing the concessions granted when 
public attention had been diverted to some other subject, 
certainly enabled it to avoid many difficulties, but it grad- 
ually enervated the whole State, which fell into the hands 
of ministers, deputies and officials who trembled before the 
daily papers, which in their turn were terrified of public 
opinion, which, failing to recognize in the papers the reflec- 



130 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

tion of its own ideas and passions, was led and dazzled by 
the press which it regarded as a higher authority. Where 
are we to seek the true centre of action and decision in this 
vicious circle of fear? It is hard to say. It must not be 
forgotten that governments which strive to please every one 
commonly end by pleasing no one. Giolitti's government 
was peculiarly exposed to this danger because Italy, since 
her unification, has had a permanent cause of complaint 
which must be recognized — one connected with the great 
transformation of modem civilization of which we have 
already spoken at length — one which may afford us the key 
to events which would otherwise be inexplicable. 

IV 

The constitution of the Kingdom of Italy was at once a 
poHtical and a social revolution. Together with parlia- 
mentary institutions and bureaucratic centralization, the 
new order of things introduced what is commonly called 
modem civilization: railways and industrial machinery, 
both of which the old regime discouraged energetically as 
liberal conceptions and institutions. Public and private 
expenditure increased considerably. Large sums were 
needed for the construction of railways, the creation of 
army, navy and administration and for educational pur- 
poses. The country was therefore obliged to endeavour to 
produce more. For Italy, too, the epoch of quantity was 
dawning. 

Italy, taken as a whole, is neither very poor nor very 
rich. She is richer than the impoverished countries of 
Southern Europe, but poorer than the wealthy ones of Cen- 
tral Europe. She is, moreover, very small. It is too often 
forgotten that France is nearly twice as large as Italy and 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 131 

that she has a population of thirty-four milHon inhabitants 
to an area of 300,000 square kilometres, wholly devoid of 
coal and almost destitute of iron. It is obvious that such a 
country was better off in the days of qualitative civiliza- 
tion, when wealth had not as yet become a prime factor in 
the development of a nation. Be that as it may, the march 
of history could not be checked and Italy was forced to 
submit to the law of our age and toil in order to increase 
the wealth of the country. Her efforts were crowned with 
success; they developed the riches of the country, its energy, 
activity, spirit of initiative and even its intelligence, at all 
events in certain directions. The poor peasantry of South- 
ern Italy learned to tread the world's highways as emi- 
grants. The people and the middle classes acquired the 
habit of hard work, extended their technical, economic and 
political knowledge and enlarged their ambitions. This 
effort, however, brought about in the generation born after 
i860 the ruin of the intellectual, artistic, social and religious 
traditions of the past, which had already been partially de- 
molished by the generation of the Risorgimento, and was 
one of the causes of the triumph of German influence which 
had already begun to make itself felt by the generation of 
the Risorgimento, more especially after 1866 and 1870. 
The joint effect of this effort and of German influence was 
to dissociate the generation born after i860 from the con- 
ceptions which the French Revolution had spread through- 
out the world — ideas in which the generation of the Risor- 
gimento had believed — and to replace them by a dreary 
materialism. A superficial observer might have been de- 
ceived into seeing signs of a fairly active intellectual life in 
Italy during the last twenty years. It has even been 
alleged that this period has seen a revival of idealism in 
direct contradiction to this excessive materialism. This in- 



132 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

tellectual life is, however, but apparent. The present gen- 
eration has no thought to spare for anything but how to 
achieve an increase of salary, income, profits and produc- 
tion; how to develop industrial machinery, increase the 
prosperity of all classes, and ensure the progress of the 
country, in accordance with the crudely quantitative con- 
ception of progress with which the masses are satisfied in 
the present day. It has subordinated everything to this 
end; it has asked nothing of art but money and pleasure; 
nothing of science and philosophy but useful discoveries, a 
pleasant social position and teaching which in no way ham- 
pers it in its pursuit of business. The intellectual classes 
have enjoyed a high degree of liberty, as is always the case 
in ages which cease to demand a high degree of perfection 
in every sphere of intellectual activity, and they have made 
the most varied uses of this liberty. The majority has 
striven to acquire money, honours and desirable positions 
by pandering to the public taste for amusement and minis- 
tering to powerful public interests. In spite of all this a 
certain minority endeavoured to prove that it could produce 
work of real value in literature, philosophy, art and science ; 
those who took the matter seriously by doing serious work 
and the more frivolous by taking advantage of the igno- 
rance of youth and the conceit of the educated classes foist- 
ing on the public productions which had little to recommend 
them but novelty and eccentricity, both frequently borrowed 
from other countries. It must be admitted that this second 
class was the more successful of the two, as well as the 
larger, since it knew how to exploit the ignorance and indif- 
ference of a day which looks upon the tonnage of mercantile 
shipping, bank deposits and the output of blasting furnaces 
as the only realities of existence. 

This conception of life, which had obtained the upper 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY laS 

hand in Italy perhaps even more thoroughly than in other 
countries, was the channel by which German influence was 
brought to bear on Italy. Germany's prestige is often at- 
tributed to her victories. This applies to the generation 
which entered upon the Triple Alliance in 1882 and wit- 
nessed the wars of 1866 and 1870, but not of its successor 
which had, moreover, a far greater admiration for Ger- 
many. It may safely be stated that in the last ten years 
all Italy, — professors and manufacturers. Socialists and 
Conservatives, free thinkers and clericals, philosophers and 
musicians alike, had been infected with Germanophilia. 
Germany was regarded as the universal model, because she 
had realized the quantitative formula of progress better than 
any other nation and was the land where population, wealth, 
production, commerce, army and navy were increasing most 
rapidly. German order and discipline seemed admirable 
to this generation which, by the way, took very good care 
not to imitate them, because they seemed important factors 
in this giddy process of development. France, on the coun- 
trary, with her tendency to consolidate her actual position 
rather than to develop it, was looked upon as an effete and 
decadent country. In spite of the affinity of language, race 
and culture, France had become a sort of enigma. The 
educated classes in Italy, who were becoming more and 
more dominated by the purely quantitative conception of 
progress, did not understand the tragic position of a country 
whose demographical conditions, traditions and historical 
tendencies alike impelled it to develop in the direction of 
quality, whilst forced to do so in the direction of quantity 
by the competition of its neighbours and above all by the 
preposterous and menacing growth of its foe. Thus Ger- 
man influence triumphed all along the line. Everything — 
army, banks, railways, industry, socialism, science, philoso- 



134 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

phy, schools and universities alike — became Germanized. 

This state of mind could not fail to influence the duration 
of the Triple Alliance. Immediately after the accession of 
Victor Emmanuel III a change became noticeable in the 
tendencies of foreign policy. The new King went to Petro- 
grad and Paris, but not to Vienna. Prinetti, who was 
Minister for Foreign Affairs during the first administration 
of the new reign, was a pronounced opponent of the Triple 
Alliance. He often remarked to his friends — and events 
have proved him a true prophet — that there would be no 
lasting peace in Europe until Germany had received a thor- 
ough thrashing. There was clearly a desire to draw closer 
to the group of powers which was soon to be known as the 
Triple Entente. Unfortunately Prinetti fell ill and the mo- 
ment Giolitti became Prime Minister with Tittoni as Min- 
ister for Foreign Affairs the old triplicist policy once more 
gained ascendancy. How is this change of front to be ex- 
plained? Undoubtedly the Russo-Japanese War had much 
to do with it, while it is also possible that secret influences 
were brought to bear. 

Even without these factors, however, it would have been 
extremely difficult to detach Italy from the Triple Alliance 
so long as the upper classes continued to regard Germany 
as the universal model. The Triple Alliance, indeed, which 
had for long been opposed, had come to be accepted by all 
classes of late years, just when it had become a constant 
menace to the peace of the world and was paving the way 
for the present catastrophe. It must not be forgotten that 
the Cabinet which committed the outrageous blunder of re- 
newing the Triple Alliance in 19 12 contained three Radical 
ministers, two of whom were amongst the most rabid 
Germanophiles in the Cabinet. 

Italy was progressing then, at least according to the pres- 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY I35 

ent day conception of progress, and she was very proud of 
the fact. Was she equally content? No. I have re- 
marked elsewhere that the glorification of national pride is 
a necessary condition of the development of modern civiliza- 
tion, which is based upon industrialism and elected institu- 
tions. Wealth neither is nor can be an aim in itself; it is 
and only can be a means. Now whatever the advantages 
ensured by modem civilization to the masses and the middle 
classes, it is very doubtful whether these advantages com- 
pensate many people for the burdens it lays upon them: 
constant and strenuous work, strict discipline, loss of per- 
sonal liberty in factory or office, military service, etc. It 
was not, therefore, sufficient for the quantitative epoch to 
show the masses the riches of the earth in order to arouse 
their zeal and activity; an ideal had also to be sought and 
found in one of the simplest and strongest passions which 
moves the soul of man: pride. The initiative and activity 
of all nations was aroused by the argument that the increase 
of wealth was a means of increasing the power and great- 
ness of the country and of showing other peoples its own 
superiority. This was the case in Italy. As Giolitti's grasp 
of power grew firmer and prosperity increased, the country 
listened more and more readily to those who, whether in 
prose or poetry, told it that Italy either was, or was about 
to become, the first country in the world. Unfortunately, 
in a period which gauges the worth of a people by statistics,' 
neither poet, nor philosopher, nor statesman could double 
the limited territory or discover in it coal fields like those 
of Lorraine or Westphalia. By strenuous and well directed 
efforts^ Italy did, it is true, succeed in increasing her wealth, 
but this increase was of necessity on a more modest scale 
than that of other nations to whom nature had been kinder, 
and gave rise to constant comparisons mortifying to the 



136 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

national amour-propre which became more sensitive as the 
nation advanced. Why should its efforts, which were quite 
as great and even more arduous than those of other peoples, 
be less productive of results ? Moods of self-congratulation 
alternated with fits of despondency, during which the coun- 
try attributed its inferiority to its frivolity, lack of disci- 
pline, military weakness, irresolution, inability to imitate 
the Teutonic virtues and, above all, to its government — 
the malleable, easy-going, prudent government which never 
dared to offend any one. The contradiction between the 
form and the substance of this government, democratic in- 
stitutions working in a country which had almost entirely 
lost faith in democratic principles, could not fail to foment 
the general uneasiness. The intellectuals and the politi- 
cians never ceased to foster these opposing mental attitudes 
by propounding every imaginable tlieory and thus adding 
intellectual to moral perplexity. The country as a whole 
was in a perpetual state of self-contradiction, which was 
reflected in the behaviour and ideas of individuals and par- 
ties alike, and had made public opinion extremely nervous. 
This nervousness and this tendency to sudden anger and 
equally sudden changes of front created at times extremely 
difficult situations even during the rule of GioHtti. At 
bottom the country was really vaguely striving after an 
ideal of life both loftier and more complete than progress 
regarded as mere increase of the wealth of the world and 
perfecting of the machinery used by man. It failed to find 
this ideal either in the present or the past. It must also 
be borne in mind that Italy has not escaped the moral de- 
terioration and self-disgust brought about by economic 
materialism and the dominion of wealth in all modern coun- 
tries in which classic learning is not confined to professors 
and libraries and in which Christianity is something more 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 137 

than merely the official religion. This explains why the 
countr}' became more and more dissatisfied both with itself 
and others just when it might have congratulated itself on 
its progress, why Giolitti's unpopularity grew^ in proportion 
to his power and why he w^as reproached more particularly 
W'ith those aspects of his policy which, by pandering to the 
passions and vices of the period, ensured his own success. 
The contradiction was inherent in the situation itself and 
came to a crisis in the Tripoli campaign. 



In order to understand aright this war and its origin, we 
must be thoroughly acquainted wuth the history of Italian 
home affairs from November, 1909. In March Giolitti 
had presided over a general election for the second time. 
In autumn, when Parliament met, he resigned, as was his 
wont. The leader of the Opposition at this time was Son- 
nino, but his party only numbered about thirty deputies; 
Giolitti, who was anxious to secure a year's rest, intended 
to make his majority support the Sonnino Cabinet, but 
Sonnino, a man of great force of character, was extremely 
unpopular with the majority, who obliged him to resign in 
three months. A more pliable man was called to take his 
place — Luzzatti — who, however, proved too pliable, too 
impressionable and too susceptible to flattery. He began 
w^ith two acts of weakness : he included four Radicals in his 
Cabinet, tw^o as ministers and two as under secretaries of 
state — and he promised to introduce a measure for the 
extension of the suffrage. These two acts were conces- 
sions to the Extreme Left — the party in the Chamber 
which Luzzatti had most reason to fear. The former was 
much more to the mind of the Extreme Left than the lat- 



138 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

ter. Ever since Giolitti's return to power all but a very 
small minority of the Radicals and Socialists had become 
more and more desirous of holding the reins of govern- 
ment, in spite of their relatively small number, with the 
help of Giolitti's personal influence. The example of Mil- 
lerand and Brand had turned the heads of a good many 
Socialists and consequently Socialists, Radicals and even 
part of the Republican party were extremely pleased to see 
four Radicals in the Cabinet. It was the thin end of the 
wedge. The suffrage question was much more compli- 
cated. As at this time no one who was unable to read and 
write could be placed on the register, illiteracy and indif- 
ference reduced the number of electors to about three mil- 
lion. The Socialists had for long demanded universal 
suffrage, but they did not really attach any great impor- 
tance to it, and demanded it mainly because they knew that 
the government would not grant it. Giolitti himself had 
opposed any such measure only a few years previously. 

By these two concessions Luzzatti had hoped to secure 
the support of, at all events, the benevolent neutrality of 
the Extreme Left. In this he succeeded but at the cost of 
gaining the ill will of the majority. This preference for 
the Extreme Left was not in the least in accordance with 
sound parliamentary principles. As for the extension of 
the suffrage, it met with great opposition, owing to the com- 
plicated nature of the system proposed by Luzzatti. The 
majority would gladly have brought about the fall of the 
Ministry, but Giolitti was not as yet inclined to resume 
office and this time he succeeded in instilling patience into 
his followers. The resulting situation was extremely curi- 
ous. In the Chamber the majority did its utmost to put ob- 
stacles in the path of the Radical ministers, who were not 
men of any special ability; the Extreme Left in its turn 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 1S9 

opposed the Cabinet ministers who belonged to the major- 
ity; while these ministers intrigued against their Radical 
fellow ministers both in the Cabinet and in the Chamber. 
Luzzatti endeavoured to gain time by making great speeches 
and promising everything which was asked of him. The 
prestige of a government soon disappears under such cir- 
cumstances. Giolitti remarked once that Luzzatti lost votes 
wholesale in order to gain them retail. Dissatisfaction 
became so general both in country and Parliament that the 
Luzzatti Cabinet fell in March, 191 1, and Giolitti was 
forced to resume office. 

He had reached the zenith of his power. Luzzatti's gov- 
ernment had created such a universal sense of irritation that 
Giolitti was hailed as a saviour. The Exertme Left hoped 
that he would form a great democratic Cabinet in which 
many of its members would hold office; the majority that 
he would dismiss the Radical ministers and abandon Luz- 
zatti's sweeping democratic measures; the country con- 
tented itself with hoping that he would govern firmly. The 
Extreme Left came off better than the majority. Giolitti 
even offered a portfolio to a Socialist, Bissolati, and when 
this offer was refused, retained in the Cabinet the four 
Radicals appointed by Luzzatti and added two more to 
their number — a minister and an under secretary of state. 
The new Radical minister, who was destined to play the 
most unfortunate part in this ill-fated Cabinet, was Nitti, 
who was nominated Minister of Agriculture, Commerce and 
Industry. But if the composition of the new Ministry did 
not fulfil the expectations of the majority, its program had 
still more unpleasant surprises in store. As for the exten- 
sion of the franchise, Giolitti brought in a much simpler 
bill than that suggested by Luzzatti : he proposed to grant 
manhood suffrage, with the one provision that electors who 



140 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

could not read or write should not be allowed to exercise 
their rights until they were thirty years of age instead of 
at twenty-one. He further proposed to make life insurance 
a State monopoly. 

It was not to be wondered at that Giolitti should continue 
Luzzatti's relations with the Extreme Left in his own pol- 
icy. He had always striven to rally the extreme parties to 
the monarchy, while at the same time endeavouring to shift 
the pivot of power from the wealthy to the lower and 
middle classes. Since the three parties of the Extreme Left 
are those representing the middle and lower classes, Gio- 
litti might well think it the part of wisdom to give these 
classes a share in the government proportioned rather to 
their social importance than to the number of their depu- 
ties. The majority, however, did not look upon it from 
the same point of view and considered that Giolitti was 
acting even less in accordance with " the sound principles 
of constitutional law " than Luzzatti had done and com- 
plained of being dispossessed by coup d'etat. A struggle 
began between the majority and its leader. The majority 
said : " I am the majority and I have, therefore, the right 
to rule." Giolitti replied : " Yes, you are the majority, 
but not by your own efforts. I created you and you are 
bound to do my will." For the first time the reality of 
this personal government came into conflict with the for- 
mulae of Parliament in which it was concealed. The diffi- 
culties consequent on this contradiction would not have been 
so serious had Giolitti not proposed at the same time to 
make life insurance a State monopoly and to introduce uni- 
versal suffrage. 

The monopoly of life insurance was not in itself a 
reform of so radical a nature as necessarily to involve such 
bitter struggles. The measure could have been carried 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 141 

without any great difficulty had it been better prepared. 
GioHtti had however, as we have seen, chosen as Minister 
of Industry a Radical deputy, Professor Nitti, and Nitti 
precipitated a political catastrophe by the carelessness and 
imprudence with which he prepared the scheme. In a few 
weeks he launched on the country a scheme which was not 
only incoherent and inadequate from various points of 
view, but in its first clause decreed in a few lines a sort of 
total confiscation without awarding the insurance compa- 
nies any compensation. According to this clause all life 
insurance companies were to cease work at once and stated 
that no compensation could be claimed for the loss entailed 
by the new law either by the insurance companies, their 
employes or the insured. Such a high handed abolition by 
the State of the rights of its subjects, such a calm appro- 
priation of private property for its own purposes was an 
unheard of thing and only an extremely strong government 
could possibly have carried such a measure and Giolitti's 
government was far from being strong. The majority, 
which disliked the composition of the Cabinet and dreaded 
the introduction of manhood suffrage, promptly rose in 
arms against the legal enormities of the bill, which was 
attacked from every point of view. The protests of those 
affected gained over parliamentary circles and ere long the 
question of manhood suffrage was relegated to the back- 
ground. For a time it was hoped that Giolitti would real- 
ize his mistake, withdraw the bill and sacrifice its unlucky 
author. This time, however, Giolitti persisted in his 
scheme. He managed to get it approved by the parliamen- 
tary commission which examined it and laid it before the 
Chamber. The situation went from bad to worse. The 
Chamber was resolved to reject the scheme, but did not 
know how to set about it. The House had entered its third 



143 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

year of existence and Giolitti was supposed to have the 
decree of dissolution in his pocket. The Sociahsts fo- 
mented the general irritation by making it plain that they 
intended to profit by the rupture between Giolitti and his 
majority to seize the reins of power. The storm, which 
had nearly broken four years before, began to lower in the 
lobbies of the Chamber and the word " treason " was whis- 
pered for the first time. Giolitti was betraying the mon- 
archy and had gone off his head. Whilst these whispers 
were heard in the lobbies, the discussion of the bill dragged 
on for weeks in the Chamber. No one dared to attack it 
boldly, and Giolitti showed no intention of yielding and 
he was only convinced of the impossibility of passing it in 
its present form by Salandra's forcible speech showing its 
absurdities and mistakes. By this time June was drawing 
to an end and Giolitti profited by this fact to ask for a 
vote approving the general principle of the law, whilst post- 
poning the discussion of its details — i.e., the essential part 
— till November, after which the House adjourned for the 
holidays. 

This affair left the ministry very weak. The scheme it- 
self, the carelessness with which it had been prepared and 
the shifty behaviour of the Chamber had disgusted the 
country. The hopes raised in April by the " great minis- 
try " had given place to bitter disappointment. Political 
circles were more and more absorbed by the scheme for 
manhood suffrage and the attitude adopted by the Socialists 
who were now posing as the next heirs to power. The dis- 
satisfied state of public opinion was aggravated by the un- 
certainty and contradictions of such a paradoxical situa- 
tion. No one knew whether Giolitti would emerge from it 
as the triumphant ruler or the hated victim. His enemies 
were working hard. Just at this juncture the " Panther " 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 143 

went to Agadir and the Franco-German pour parleys on the 
Morocco question began. Ere long no one doubted that 
Morocco was about to become a French protectorate. 
Many newspapers then reminded the pubhc that once Mo- 
rocco had become French, the only territory in North 
Africa left for Italy would be Tripoli and pointed out that 
if she failed to seize this opportunity, she would be encir- 
cled and stifled in the Mediterranean. 

Until that time the Italian people had but a very vague 
notion of Tripoli. The efforts made by writers and politi- 
cians after the Mediterranean agreements with France and 
England to draw its attention to these regions had been 
fruitless. The memory of Adowa still lay heavy upon the 
nation, but this time to the astonishment even of those who 
had opened the campaign with but Httle hope of rousing the 
people from its indifference, public opinion suddenly showed 
an interest in the matter — an interest which grew daily. 
Yes, Italy would lose an opportunity which could never 
recur if Giolitti's government showed its usual indifference 
to the great questions of international and colonial policy. 
In reality Tripoli was but a pretext. The country was 
longing to escape from the state of discontent and despond- 
ency I have described and it seized this occasion, regardless 
of danger, in the hope of finding in Tripoli what it had 
vainly sought in liberalism — the increase of wealth, a new, 
happier and nobler life. When, however, the public as- 
serted that if France took Morocco, Italy must take Tripoli, 
it forgot that Tripoli was a province of the Ottoman Em- 
pire, and that since Turkey was a European power, to seize 
Tripoli would upset the balance of Europe, on which de- 
pended the peace of the world. It was easy enough for the 
nation to demand Tripoli ; it was quite another matter for 
the government to satisfy its wishes. Accordingly it hesi- 



144i EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

tated. When, however, the press, the various political par- 
ties and those who did not wish to see the Radicals in 
power, or the introduction of the State life insurance mo- 
nopoly and manhood suffrage saw both this hesitation and 
the excited condition of public opinion, they did everything 
in their power to excite public opinion still more as the 
most efficacious way of discrediting the Ministry. They 
succeeded so well that the Cabinet realized that its fall was 
inevitable if it tried to resist the wishes of the people. If 
Giolitti had not set up a Radical ministry; if he had not 
tried to introduce either the life insurance monopoly or man- 
hood suffrage, he would probably have been able to make the 
country understand that it was impossible to attack another 
Power without rhyme or reason merely because the nation 
desired to do so. Under the circumstances, however, he 
could not enforce this view, since, had he attempted it, all 
his enemies and political opponents would immediately have 
accused him of betraying the interests of the country; he 
could not have hoped, with all his power, to withstand the 
onslaughts of excited public opinion and the fate which over- 
took him in the spring of 191 5 would have been his in the 
spring of 191 1. 

The government therefore decided upon war and declared 
it as best it could. From the point of view of International 
Law, the pretext for hostilities was somewhat feeble, and 
those who had kept their heads were therefore not sur- 
prised that Italy's step was not cordially received by the 
other Powers. This attitude annoyed Italy and the extent 
to which the country had been Germanized during the last 
thirty years suddenly became manifest. The nation, or at 
all events the most influential classes, seemed to take a 
morbid pleasure in making a bad use of its power, in reply- 
ing angrily to all foreign criticisms, even the most courte- 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 145 

ous and reasonable, in abusing all Europe, in clamouring 
for the extermination of the enemy, in exalting war and 
conquest as the sacred rights of the higher races and in 
forcibly suppressing all dissentient voices. Every arrange- 
ment suggested which might have saved the prestige of the 
Sultan whilst at the same time giving satisfaction to Italy 
was regarded as humiliating, and the country demanded 
unconditioned victory with such resolution that the govern- 
ment was forced to issue the decree of annexation. There 
was but little dissent from this universal greed for conquest; 
the Socialists were, to do them justice, the only political 
party to oppose it. The storm which had threatened to ruin 
Giolitti and his Cabinet blew over, the sky cleared and Gio- 
litti actually became popular. Such is the irony of human 
affairs! The man, who had been unpopular when he had 
striven to make the country prosperous and contented and 
to please every one as far as in him lay, became the object 
of general admiration and had to make speeches from his 
balcony to crowds beside themselves with enthusiasm when 
his errors in home affairs had forced him to forge the first 
link in the claim which was to end in the world war. 

Whilst the nation was intoxicated with dreams of con- 
quest, the government had made the same blunder as in 
1896 and was entering upon a colonial campaign with the 
forces intended merely for home defence — a blunder which 
had the gravest consequences. At the beginning of the war 
even the masses were full of enthusiasm; they had taken 
the press too literally and were convinced that Tripoli was 
a country of fabulous wealth which would afford land and 
work to millions of emigrants. Their enthusiasm cooled 
rapidly. The Italian generals were obliged to wage a war 
of positions, for blood could not be shed recklessly in 
order to achieve the conquest of what the troops rightly 



146 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

or wrongly regarded as a sandy waste. The war dragged 
slowly along and became a source of anxiety not only to 
Italy but to the whole of Europe. The enthusiasm of the 
first few months gave place to impatience, irritation and 
even greater discontent than that prevailing before the war. 
The government, which was still anxious to pass the Insur- 
ance Monopoly and Manhood Suffrage Bills, had recourse 
to all kinds of artifices — such as press campaigns, an at- 
tack on the Dardanelles and the occupation of the Dodeca- 
nese — in order to keep up the spirits of the people. It 
succeeded in passing a modified form of the Life Insurance 
Monopoly Bill which had more respect for vested rights 
and in introducing Manhood Suffrage. A little later, dur- 
ing the autumn of 191 2, it also succeeded in concluding 
peace with Turkey. These successes, however, only weak- 
ened the power of the government. The two years which 
elapsed after the introduction of this electoral reform and 
before the outbreak of the European War were amongst 
the most anxious through which Italy has passed since i860. 
The Peace of Lausanne was hailed with joy, as a way out 
of an intolerable situation, but it satisfied no one. It was 
a matter of universal knowledge that while Italy had not 
been defeated in Tripoli, she had not achieved the complete 
success hoped for. The disappointment was aggravated 
by the fear of possible internal repercussions. The coming 
elections, the first since manhood suffrage had become an 
accomplished fact, were the absorbing thought of political 
circles. This common anxiety instead of, as might have 
been expected, showing the advisability of union between 
the ruling classes, seemed to make them more suspicious of 
one another, whilst the general public was weary and indif- 
ferent. The two Balkan wars, the many evidences of the 
increasing instability of the European balance of power, 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 147 

the menacing growth of the German army and navy, and 
the incessant Austrian intrigues, made but little impression 
on either the government, political circles, the press or the 
nation. Deputies and parties alike were busy trying to 
gain government support during the coming elections and 
were carrying on a fierce wordy warfare both in Parliament 
and the press. The public took no interest whatsoever in 
these intrigues and struggles, thus leaving the government 
free to settle the most weighty matters as it thought fit. 
The government, thus left to itself by public opinion, weak- 
ened by the war, and itself anxious as to the results of the 
coming elections, allowed itself to be influenced by passing 
events, habit and every kind of intrigue. Austria and 
Germany profited by this state of things to induce the gov- 
ernment to renew the Triple Alliance before the term agreed 
upon, to take their side against Serbia, to support their 
policy in Albania and to do everything in its power to bring 
about the second Balkan war, of which Italy is now feeling 
the disastrous results. The Marquis of San Giuliano, at 
this time Minister for Foreign Affairs, who was left to his 
own devices, readily yielded to the various influences 
brought to bear upon him, whilst Giolitti devoted his whole 
attention to the general election, employing to their fullest 
extent his favourite tactics of weakening all parties by 
intermingling them. The confusion which prevailed during 
the general elections of 19 13 will never be forgotten. In 
one district the Minister supported the Socialist candidate 
against the Clerical ; in another the Clerical against the So- 
cialist; the very same Prefect who in one constituency sup- 
ported the Radical candidate opposed him violently in the 
neighbouring one. These contradictions were specially 
marked in the large towns, where the government policy 
varied according to the street and district. Influential 



148 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

deputies belonging to Giolitti's personal party were of 
course supported against every party. The most notable 
instance of this confusion was that of a Cabinet Minister, 
a prominent Free Mason, who seemed about to be defeated 
by a Clerical candidate, when the Vatican, at the request 
of the government, ordered the Clerical to withdraw his 
candidature in favour of the Socialist. 

The result of the elections was disastrous. Out of five 
million electors, one million voted for the Socialists, who 
had eighty seats in the new Chamber as against forty in 
the preceding one. They gained this large number of votes 
— more especially in the country districts — because they 
had had the courage to protest against the Tripoli cam- 
paign, and would probably have gained still more, had they 
conducted their anti-war campaign with more boldness and 
intelligence. This result of the elections increased the 
general depression. The Chamber became the scene of in- 
vective disturbances and even blows ; Giolitti as usual seized 
the first favourable opportunity of resigning and was suc- 
ceeded by Salandra, who, next to Sonnino, was the most 
influential member of the small party of the Right which 
had always remained in Opposition. His selection was 
not, however, due to any recognition of the principles of 
constitutional law, but because it was absolutely essential 
to place at the head of the government a man who, while 
more malleable than Sonnino, was both capable and con- 
scious of the seriousness of his position, and would en- 
deavour, without breaking with Giolitti and his party, to 
deal with the situation resulting from the war and the pol- 
icy of the late government. Salandra, though he did not 
attempt to form a Conservative Ministry, dissociated him- 
self from the Radicals, and set to work. He was, however, 
soon confronted with the most unforeseen difficulties. Be- 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 149 

fore Giolitti resigned, he had proposed various new taxes 
to cover the deficit caused by the war. The new Cabinet 
brought forward these measures, which were clearly abso- 
lutely necessary, but the Socialists opposed them by every 
means in their power on the ground that the poor were to 
be made to pay for a war desired by the rich. Whilst the 
government was still trying to overcome this opposition, 
a skirmish took place at Ancona between the police and a 
crowd which had taken part in a political meeting. The 
police fired upon the people and killed one person; the 
Socialist party proclaimed a general strike which in many 
towns caused outbreaks of violence; stations and churches 
were burnt down, revolver shots exchanged freely; several 
town in Romagna proclaimed themselves republics, while 
everywhere the authorities, taken by surprise, dealt with 
the outburst with a sort of fatalistic inertia. Order was 
re-established, but, though the government succeeded in 
putting down the riots, it failed to overcome the obstruc- 
tionary tactics of Parliament and had to content itself with 
a compromise: i.e., a royal decree authorizing it to impose 
these taxes for one year. The upper classes were pervaded 
with a sense of insecurity and indeed the whole country felt 
as if it were on the edge of a volcano. It was under these 
disquieting circumstances that the Chamber adjourned in 
the summer of 19 14. In a few weeks a far greater storm 
burst over the world — the European War. 

VI 

When confronted with this cataclysm, the country pulled 
itself together. German aggression and the violation of 
Belgium neutrality aroused in the masses that moral sense 
which the Tripoli campaign had dulled, while at the same 



150 iEUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

time opening the eyes of the nation to the danger threaten- 
ing Italy, and the Power which had begun a world war with 
such criminal callousness, which had broken faith with such 
insolence and had proclaimed to the world that it recog- 
nized no law but that of might, became in a few days the 
object of general execration. Justice, honour, loyalty, 
right, all those ideals in fact which the era of quantity had 
scorned, once more became matters of moment. The ha- 
tred of Germanism, which had been latent amongst the 
masses since the days of the Guelfs and Ghibellines, sud- 
denly awoke and intense indignation was roused in all 
classes. 

The Treaty of the Triple Alliance was denounced on 
May 4th, 191 5, but it had really been rejected by the nation 
between the ist and 4th of August, 191 4. Even if the 
Italian government had been foolish enough to pledge itself 
to take part in a war of pillage and aggression, it would 
not have been able to keep its word, for the country would 
have refused to support it. It was in vain that the German 
ambassador offered the Italian government Tunis and two 
milliards of francs and that the military attache tried to 
convince Cadorna that it was a matter of a short and easy 
campaign, that " in six weeks the whole thing would be 
over." If the government had at that moment been in a 
position to renounce the Treaty and declare war on the 
Germanic empires, the country would have supported it 
with enthusiasm, but such a course was not possible and 
Italy had to resign herself to being a mere spectator of the 
great struggle, though there could be no doubt as to which 
way her sympathies lay. The masses quickly realized that 
nothing could be a greater disaster than the annihilation of 
France; old quarrels were forgotten and the three weeks 
which elapsed between the battle of Charleroi and the bat- 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 151 

tie of the Marne were weeks of the most intense anxiety. 
During those three weeks, the circulation of the newspapers, 
which had risen considerably since the outbreak of the war, 
dropped rapidly, for the public would not read the bad news 
they contained. 

The Battle of the Marne and the Battle of Lemberg al- 
layed their fears, the former especially being hailed with 
great joy. Italy was glad to receive proof that, in spite of 
all that had been said about the decadence of France, there 
was still beyond the Alps an army strong enough to bar 
the road to Paris. The public gradually realized that the 
surprise sprung on Europe by the two empires had failed, 
that the war was developing along unexpected lines and 
would be of long duration. The part which Italy would 
have to play soon came to the fore. The general feeling 
of sympathy for the Allies and of disgust with the Central 
Empires was so strong that the possibility of Italy's ranging 
herself on the side of Germany and Austria was never even 
considered. Italy had to choose between neutrality and 
going to war against the two empires and on this point the 
country split into two parties — the Neutralists and the 
Interventionalists. 

If we are to understand the ensuing struggle aright, we 
must have a clear grasp of its causes. The party which 
from the first was heart and soul for the war was recruited 
from the educated classes — journalists, teachers at the sec- 
ondary schools, men of letters, students, and the most cul- 
tured section of the upper middle class and the nobility. 
It also included a small number of university professors, 
but the majority of these professors remained true to Ger- 
many which they regarded as the fount of all learning. 
The journalists were the most active advocates of the Inter- 
ventionalist movement. The press, with the exception of a 



152 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

few newspapers which were frankly organs of the Neutral- 
ist party, was favourable to interv^ention, even the papers 
which had hitherto supported the Triple Alliance and looked 
favourably on the spread of German influence in the coun- 
try taking up the same line. Many Interventionalists, more 
especially those belonging to conservative circles, realized 
that if Italy did not intervene, she would find herself in a 
position of dangerous isolation after the war. National 
aspirations, Irredentism, as they were commonly called, the 
re-conquest of the Italian provinces still subject to the 
Hapsburgs, were the main ground for intervention in the 
eyes of many young men of the conserv'ative classes and 
also of the Republican and Socialist parties, which had been 
Irredentist out of opposition to the Triple AlHance, The 
parties of the Extreme Left realized, moreover, with anxi- 
ety the inevitable political and social consequences of the 
victory of the Germanic empires — the triumph of mili- 
tarism, of the monarchical principle and of reactionary 
ideas. The dread of German hegemony weighed more or 
less heavily on all classes. The unbounded ambition of 
Germany together with her desperate efforts to satisfy it 
had taken the whole world by surprise, since Germany had 
always been regarded as the nation most nearly approaching 
the modern ideal of progress and there were very few who 
had any suspicion that the gospel of progress could give 
birth to ambitions and acts of violence such as those at 
which Italy was now gazing in horror. This very aston- 
ishment added to the universal dismay. Moreover, it must 
not be forgotten that amongst the reasons which inclined 
many people to intervention was the ancient hatred of 
Austria and a half unconscious desire to engage in some 
great enterprise which should enable the country to shake 
off the spirit of despondency and unrest resulting from the 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 153 

events of the last few years. The InterventionaHst intel- 
lectuals belonged to all parties. Moreover, in each party 
there was a group of intellectuals which did its utmost to 
win over the whole party — an effort which succeeded in 
certain cases and failed in others. The Radicals, Repub- 
licans and Reformist Socialists declared for intervention; 
the Official Socialists and the Clericals for neutrality; the 
Conservatives and the Liberals — that is to say, the classes 
and groups upon w^hich the government had leaned until 
Giolitti's Radical ministry came into power — did not com- 
mit themselves definitely one way or the other. If w^e are 
to have a clear grasp of the attitude of the various parties, 
we must not forget to take into account an important fact 
which is the key to the events which led to Italy's inter- 
vention — that the masses, i.e., the peasants, working men, 
and lower middle classes, the classes affected by the intro- 
duction of manhood suffrage — much as they detested Ger- 
many and Austria never desired war. They wanted peace 
for the simple reason that they considered it preferable to 
war. " We will go to war when we are attacked," summed 
up their view of the case. The considerations of world 
policy, the equilibrium of Europe and the danger of German 
hegemony were altogether beyond their comprehension, and 
they were utterly indifferent to Irredentism. No one had 
spoken to them of Trieste and Trent for thirty-two years, 
for the government had enforced silence on this national 
question in deference to the Triple Alliance. 

The attitude of the lower classes explains why the Social- 
ists and the Clericals declared for neutrality. In the case 
of the Clericals there was another reason, this party having 
always been Francophobe and Austrophile, for reasons 
which are not hard to seek. The attitude of the masses 
also affords an explanation of the contradictions and oscil- 



154 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

lations of the Liberals and Conservatives; in other words, 
the ruling classes. Thus, while the organs of these parties 
and classes were for the most part favourable to interven- 
tion, the Chamber and the Senate were impenitent neutral- 
ists. The Chamber was afraid of the electors brought in 
by manhood suffrage who had so plainly shown their dis- 
satisfaction with the Tripoli campaign and was moreover 
anxious as to the political consequences of intervention. 
Would not a break with the Germanic Empires be tanta- 
mount to confessing that the alliance of thirty-two years 
had been a mistake? Would it not put a formidable 
weapon into the hands of the Opposition? Whilst the Rad- 
icals and Republicans were filled with anxiety as to the 
poHtical consequences of a German victory, the Conserva- 
tives were equally anxious as to the results of a German 
defeat. The exaggerated veneration for everything Ger- 
man so prevalent during the last thirty years in certain 
aristocratic and intellectual circles — more particularly in 
the universities — seemed to have disappeared with the first 
shock of the war, but raised its head afresh when the inter- 
vention campaign began, as was evidenced by the appear- 
ance in Rome during the autumn of i9i4ofa weekly jour- 
nal published by a group of professors at the University 
of Rome, whose object was the seconding of Prince Bulow's 
intrigues by means of a venomous and unscrupulous cam- 
paign against the Triple Entente and especially against 
France. Economic considerations also played their part, 
for it must not be forgotten that during the last ten years 
Italy's trade with Germany and Austria had become more 
important than that with the Entente Powers. The Central 
Empires afforded the chief market for Italy's agricultural 
produce. German influence also predominated in both the 
banking and the industrial world. If to these reasons we 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 155 

add anxiety as to how the losses and expenses of the war 
were to be met, the uncertainty as to its duration and issue, 
we shall readily understand why government circles and 
their supporters hesitated to take action. 

Ere long the question of intervention became the subject 
of lively discussions which were however confined to cer- 
tain small circles. The masses remained quiescent. At 
this juncture von Biilow arrived in Rome and set to work, 
much in the same way as if he had been at Athens or Con- 
stantinople. He bought everything which was for sale in 
the press and in the political world; he rallied round him 
all those German interests which might be expected to exer- 
cise pressure on the country and he took advantage of his 
numerous personal connections to plot and intrigue in po- 
litical circles. He found many supporters among the Slav- 
ish admirers of Germany and the professional members of 
the Senate which became the centre of pro-German and 
unpatriotic intrigues. What was the Government about in 
the meantime? The government too had pulled itself to- 
gether and, after proclaiming the neutrality of Italy, was 
preparing armaments with a rapidity and energy hitherto 
unknown. San Giuliano having died, Sonnino became 
Minister for Foreign Affairs — a very significant appoint- 
ment — for while Sonnino has his faults like any other 
man, it is an undeniable fact that his devotion to duty had 
ended by making him extremely unpopular in Parliamentary 
circles. As for the line to be taken up by Italy, the govern- 
ment had come to the conclusion that she could not remain 
merely a spectator for an indefinite period ; further that the 
government ought to take advantage of this excellent op- 
portunity of settling the question of the Unredeemed Prov- 
inces — a question at once national and strategical — that 
this question should be settled diplomatically if possible, 



156 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

but that if diplomacy failed, Italy should have recourse to 
arms. Accordingly on December 9th, 19 14, Sonnino 
opened negotiations with Austria by requesting that the con- 
ditions contained in Art, 7 of the Treaty of Alliance would 
be carried out. This article laid down that any act which 
disturbed the power of balance in the Balkans, whether per- 
formed by Italy or Austria, would entitle the other Power 
to compensation. By declaring war on Serbia, Austria had 
disturbed the balance of power in the Balkans, thus giving 
Italy the right to compensation. 

This step was both perfectly correct and extremely clever,. 
The Italian government could not be accused of wishing 
to violate the treaty, since it was merely asking that one of 
its provisions be carried into efifect. If Austria consented 
to settle the national and strategical question of the Unre- 
deemed Provinces by way of compensation — a contingency 
which the government regarded as very improbable — the 
government would have a decisive argument wherewith to 
convince the Interventionists of the futility of their war 
propaganda ; if Austria refused, the Neutralists would be 
forced to admit that war was unavoidable. I believe I am 
correct in stating that this line of conduct was taken up 
by the government with the full knowledge and approval 
of Giolitti, who as the leader of the majority was bound 
to afford all possible assistance to the government. It must 
be admitted that he gave his support as ungrudgingly as the 
circumstances demanded. It cannot, however, be said that 
his followers did their duty equally well. They could not 
forget that Salandra and Sonnino were the two most emi- 
nent members of the small group of the Right which had 
never ceased its opposition to Giolitti's government. They 
had agreed to support Salandra for a few months while 
Giolitti enjoyed a rest, but the European War threatened 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 157 

to upset their whole game. The Salandra Cabinet seemed 
settling into power and, if it managed to conduct a great 
national war successfully, might it not rally to itself suffi- 
cient forces to dispossess the Giolittians altogether? They 
therefore began to make trouble in Parliamentary circles, 
alleging on the one hand that the government was rushing 
the nation into a war which could not fail to be disastrous, 
and, on the other, that if war were really inevitable, the con- 
duct of it ought to be in the hands of Giolitti and his party. 
During the whole winter of 19 15 a spirit of unrest per- 
vaded the upper classes and Parliamentary circles. Both 
political parties and the press continued their pro or anti- 
war propaganda. The Ministry continued its secret nego- 
tiations with Austria. Von Biilow poured out gold like 
water, invited senators to dinner and intrigued in the polit- 
ical world. Giolitti's lieutenants worked the Parliamentary 
circles where they felt themselves strongest, while the So- 
cialists carried on their campaign against intervention with 
increased energy and attacked the Ministry with ever grow- 
ing violence. Is the story true that during March and 
April very intimate relations had been set up between von 
Biilow and certain of Giolitti's most prominent lieutenants? 
I cannot say and I would fain hope that German influence 
had nothing to do with the fierce and virulent campaign 
carried on by the official organ of the Socialists in order 
to prove that all the belligerents were equally to blame and 
that France and Great Britain were just as much actuated 
by capitalist motives and greed of conquest as Germany. 
Whatever may have taken place during these months, it is 
a fact that the public, which had remained perfectly calm, 
was much less interested in these intrigues and discussions 
than in trying to divine the real intentions of the govern- 
ment Did it mean to remain neutral or to go to war? 



158 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

We now know what it was doing and what its real inten- 
tions were, but at this time it was only known that it was 
negotiating both with Austria and the Triple Entente, whilst 
Interventionalist circles were inclined to blame it severely 
for what they considered disgraceful bargaining with Aus- 
tria. The most widely different rumours were in the air, 
and towards the end of Italy's period of neutrality — i.e., 
in March and April, 19 15, the general public began to show 
signs of unrest. Uncertainty was enervating public opin- 
ion, for a nation cannot live for months under the shadow of 
impending war without becoming excited. 

Suddenly, on April 21st there was an indication that the 
crisis was not far off. On that day the Socialist organ 
Avanti published an interview with a " former minister " 
of the Giolitti Cabinet, in which the state of the negotiations 
between Austria on the one hand and the Triple Entente 
on the other was set forth and the conclusion drawn that 
Italy ought to remain neutral and even strengthen her ties 
to Germany in order to safeguard her Adriatic interests. 
Whoever may have been the personage concerned and what- 
ever the value of his conclusions, the revelations as to the 
negotiations were absolutely correct. Those who were au 
courant of the situation made no mistake as to the object 
of the articles in question, which was an anti-war manoeuvre 
arranged with the Socialist organ by persons whose accu- 
rate information proved them to be highly placed. The 
Neutralist party was preparing to make a general appeal 
to the masses against the government and the Intervention- 
alists. It was obvious therefore that the war party was 
getting the upper hand in ministerial circles. A few days 
later Paris telegrams announced in a somewhat vague form 
that Italy had signed an agreement with the Powers of the 
Triple Entente. The news was denied, confirmed and de- 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 159 

nied again. It was next announced that the King intended 
to be present at the unveiHng of the monument to Gari- 
baldi's Thousand at Quarto which was expected to be a 
great Interventionalist demonstration. At the same time 
contradictory rumours as to the issue of the negotiations 
with Austria multipHed. The agreement had been con- 
cluded — it had not been concluded — the King would de- 
clare war at Quarto — Italy was about to resume her old 
place in the Triple Alliance. Suddenly it was announced 
that the King was not going to Quarto at all, but this an- 
nouncement was accompanied by another to the effect that 
his change of plans was due to the fact that the government 
had come to decisions of such weight that the Head of the 
State could not be absent from Rome. What had really 
happened ? The public racked its brains in vain. On May 
5th the Quarto monument was unveiled, but the ceremony 
did not make the expected impression on the nation and 
was even followed by a certain amount of disappointment. 
The absence of the King and members of government had 
been explained on the ground of impending serious deci- 
sions and the nation accordingly expected some news of 
importance on the 5th or 6th. None came. The public 
was inclined to believe that the government had not taken 
part in the ceremony at Quarto for fear of annoying Prince 
von Bulow, as had been stated by certain newspapers. 
Then suddenly the Giolittian section of the press published 
a list of concessions made by Austria and announced that 
Giolitti had been summoned to Rome by the King. On 
May 7th Giolitti left Cavour for Turin and on the follow- 
ing day he arrived in Rome. 

What had happened? The mystery is now revealed in 
part. Since December the Government had been negotiat- 
ing with Austria without, however, coming to any arrange- 



160 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

ment. The Green Book tells the story of these fruitless 
negotiations. It took time to induce Austria to admit the 
possibility of a discussion based on Article 7 and further 
time to induce her to make any proposals. What she 
offered was much less than Italy asked. Moreover, the 
question as to when the agreement would be carried into 
effect was a source of great difficulty. On April 26th the 
government signed an agreement with the Triple Entente, 
valid if Italy declared war within a month. The govern- 
ment had decided to hurry events and declare war without 
delay if Austria would not accede to Italy's demands. 

On May 3d, Austria having refused to yield, the govern- 
ment denounced the Triple Alliance. This meant war. I 
think I am safe in saying that these two steps — the agree- 
ment with the Triple Entente and the denunciation of the 
Treaty — were taken without consulting Giolitti who was 
still at his home in Piedmont. Parliamentary circles soon 
divined that war was imminent. The anxiety of the ma- 
jority, of official circles, and of the Giolitti party was great 
and the Pro-German party in the Senate redoubled its 
activities, as did also von Biilow. What took place at this 
juncture? It is difficult to say for certain. Too many 
points are still far from clear. But it would appear that 
Germany and Austria, alarmed by the denunciation of the 
Triple Alliance, which came as a painful surprise, had or- 
ganized a plot to overthrow the Cabinet with the assistance 
of various senators. Socialists and lieutenants of Giolitti's, 
influential personages sufficiently blinded by political pas- 
sion to lend themselves to the intrigues of foreign Powers. 
The idea which gave rise to this conspiracy seems to have 
been as follows: The Neutralists had a large majority 
in the Chamber — numbering as they did 400 out of 508 
deputies. The Chamber was to meet on May 20th. The 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 161 

problem was how to bring about the fall of the Ministry 
before that date, thus preventing it from declaring war, 
and then confronting Parliament with the accomplished 
fact ? How was it to be done ? In this dilemma the Neu- 
tralists turned to the powerful politician who had prac- 
tically created the Chamber and appeared to hold the fate 
of the Cabinet in the hollow of his hand. 

In my opinion Giolitti was not absolutely opposed to the 
idea of declaring war on Austria. He, too, realized the 
necessity of taking advantage of the European War in 
order to settle the question of Italy's eastern frontier if he 
did not wish to give the Opposition a formidable weapon 
against the monarchy but, since he was convinced that the 
war would be very long, he thought that Italy should only 
intervene if absolutely necessary, when, that is to say, di- 
plomacy had failed, and that her intervention should even 
then be deferred until the last possible moment. I am also 
of the opinion that he hoped that it would be possible to 
go to war with Austria only and not with Germany, which 
latter power he had always regarded as a necessary guaran- 
tee of Italy's safety with France and Great Britain. This 
scheme was ingenious enough ; the only doubt was its feasi- 
bility. Such being Giolitti's views, it is easy to see why 
the Neutralists regarded him as the one man who could 
force the Salandra Cabinet to resign before the Chamber 
met. Giolitti was to be called to Rome by the King; Aus- 
tria was to make fresh concessions in addition to those 
already rejected by the Cabinet; these new concessions were 
not to be communicated to the government, which had 
already denounced the treaty, but given to the public in the 
columns of the papers implicated in the plot ; a demonstra- 
tion in favour of Giolitti was to be organized in the ranks 
of the Parliamentary majority, after which Giolitti was 



162 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

to declare that there must be no rupture with Austria and 
that the discussion of the proposed concessions must con- 
tinue. The Cabinet would find itself confronted by a pop- 
ular peace movement on the one hand, — in which the 
Socialists were expected to play a leading part — and a 
Parliamentary demonstration on the other and would have 
no choice but to resign. It is easy to see the weak point of 
this intrigue as far as the Italians involved were concerned. 
They were co-operating with foreign Powers, which were 
on the point of becoming enemies, in order to bring about 
the fall of the Ministry, It must, however, in justice be 
added that men who were thoroughly au courant of the 
situation and whose loyalty is beyond suspicion declare that 
on May 8th, when Giolitti left Turin for Rome, he was not 
aware that the latest Austrian concessions had not been 
communicated to the Italian government and that he was 
under the impression that he had to deal with official pro- 
posals which had been properly presented. Giolitti himself 
had therefore been deceived by German diplomacy, which 
rewarded him for his fidelity to the Triple Alliance by tell- 
ing him a lie which induced him to make a faux pas which 
was destined to have the gravest possibile results. This 
scheme, an excellent example of the unscrupulous boldness 
of German diplomacy, seemed at first about to succeed. By 
some means or other Giolitti's summons to Rome was ac- 
complished; he arrived on May 9th and next day had an 
audience with the King and a long conversation with Salan- 
dra. He must therefore have known that the agreement 
with the Triple Entente had been signed and had already 
begun to come into effect, that the Triple Alliance had been 
denounced, and that Austria's latest proposals were of a 
wholly unofficial character and were simply a low stratagem 
to deceive both Parliament and the nation. How was it 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 16S 

that he failed to reahze that it was not possible to undo 
what had been done, that war was inevitable and that 
everything must be done to avoid spreading distrust amongst 
the masses who were still cherishing lingering hopes of 
peace? Had he compromised himself too deeply with his 
lieutenants? Was he simply giving vent to his annoyance 
with the Cabinet for taking such important steps without 
consulting him? Did he fail to realize the gravity of his 
proceedings? Had he gone too far to draw back? His- 
tory may perhaps shed light on the mystery. The fact 
remains that on the day following Giolitti's interview with 
the King the iicwspapers announced that, according to him, 
the negotiations with Austria were to continue. The effect 
of this declaration at first seemed very marked. Three 
hundred deputies and a large number of senators rushed to 
leave their cards on Giolitti; there were excited scenes in 
the lobbies of both Chamber and Senate and shouts of 
" Down with the Pro-war Cabinet," while both the Crown 
and the Ministry had to face a very awkward situation. 
The Alliance with the Central Empires had been denounced 
and the understanding with the Triple Entente was already 
being carried into effect: how could Italy go back? Yet 
how could she declare war in the face of vacillating public 
opinion and directly against the wishes of Parliament? 
There was some talk of bringing the question before Par- 
liament, but the danger of such a course was obvious. The 
Ministry was therefore forced to choose between a coup 
d'etat and resignation. It decided to resign. Then certain 
sections of public opinion veered round. The movement 
began amongst the educated classes, but quickly gained 
over part of the aristocracy, lower and upper middle classes. 
This change was brought about by a variety of sentiments : 
the disgrace of seeing Italy descend to the level of Greece; 



164. EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

anxiety as to the probable result of such vacillation; the 
longing to put an end to the uncertainty in which the coun- 
try had lived for the last two months. But there were 
two sentiments which did even more to produce the storm. 
One of these was anger at Germany's interference in Italy's 
home policy. Erzberger is said to have furnished the news- 
papers which lent themselves to the conspiracy with the 
famous hst of the latest Austrian concessions; if this be so, 
the Triple Entente has every reason to be grateful to him. 
The overbearing, encroaching spirit and perpetual intrigues 
of German diplomats, bankers, and even of those officials 
whom the Italian government had been weak enough to take 
into its service had been tolerated too long, but this time 
the unscrupulous insolence of German and Austrian diplo- 
macy met with the chastisement it so richly deserved, and 
the fury of the people was aroused when it saw Italy 
treated like some decadent eastern state. There was a 
violent outbreak of hatred for Giolitti who in those two 
days had to face the accumulated detestation which his 
rule had earned in the course of years. The opponents of 
his Manhood Suffrage Bill and of the State monopoly of 
life insurance, together with those who disliked his system 
of personal government, his weak foreign policy, and his 
contradictory home policy, seized the opportunity of aveng- 
ing their wrongs. His third attempt — or what the public 
regarded as his third attempt — to resume power when it 
happened to suit him disgusted the people. Was the gov- 
ernment of a country like Italy to be, so to speak, the per- 
sonal property of Giolitti ? Shouts of " traitor " and 
" treason " were heard in the streets and echoed by the 
press, while in the large cities, and especially in Rome and 
Milan, there were constant demonstrations whose war-cry 
was " Death to Giolitti." In Rome the best known mem- 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 165 

bers of the former Premier's party were abused and sub- 
jected to violence in the streets and the Houses of Parlia- 
ment were invaded by a furious crowd. Parliament, press 
and political parties, who had for long been accustomed to 
yield to any fairly decided expression of public opinion, 
made no attempt at resistance. The newspapers either at- 
tacked Giolitti or were silent; the senators and deputies 
who were too deeply compromised disappeared ; others were 
suddenly converted to intervention; in two days Giolitti's 
personal rule, which had appeared invulnerable, collapsed, 
while Giolitti himself, forsaken by his party, was forced to 
shut himself up in his hotel lest he should be shot in the 
streets by one of the numerous Interventionalists, who 
would fain have punished the " traitor ! " When the dem- 
onstrations had lasted three days the King, who for all his 
reserve was favourable to the course matters had taken, 
put an end to the struggle by announcing that the war party 
had carried the day. He refused to accept the resignation 
of the Cabinet; Parliament understood that King and Cabi- 
net were of one mind and yielded to the force of circum- 
stances. Fiction had for a moment endeavoured to become 
reality, but the wrath of the nation had promptly banished 
it to the realm of shadows. War was voted for almost 
unanimously by a Senate and Chamber of which the ma- 
jority would not even hear of such a thing ten days before. 
It must not, however, be supposed that all Italy rose 
during those stormy May days. With but a few exceptions 
the masses took little part in the political demonstrations, 
which however were furthered even by their abstinence 
from active participation, since the plan of the German 
Embassy of bringing about the fall of the Cabinet might 
have succeeded had the Socialists started counter-agitations 
in the Neutralist interests. Had they done so, disturbances 



166 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

would undoubtedly have taken place and with civil war 
menacing it, the government would not have ventured to 
declare war on Austria. Why did the Socialists remain 
quiescent instead of coming out boldly at the decisive mo- 
ment? For the simple reason that, while they desired 
peace, they hated Austria who had let loose the hounds of 
war and, when the underhand manoeuvre was revealed to 
which they were asked to give their support, were not in- 
clined to engage in a sort of civil war on behalf of the King 
of Prussia and the ravages of Belgium. They left the 
Interventionalists masters of the situation and the war 
party triumphed. 

VII 

And now Italy, like all the other European peoples, is in 
the hands of God or of Destiny — whichever you choose 
to call it. She has nobly redeemed the error of the Tripoli 
campaign by intervening in this most appalling of wars 
without being forced to do so by any direct attack, thus 
ranging herself on the side of the nations who have been 
the victims of German aggression and are struggling to 
save Europe from an intolerable hegemony. ^The impulse 
which made her take this step was not, however, as has 
been often said a mere outburst of national feeling. It was 
something much more complicated — something far deeper. 
The necessity of putting an end to an artificial, contradic- 
tory and enervating system of government; shame at hav- 
ing for so long submitted meekly to German influence ; hor- 
ror and dread of this monstrous power resting on numbers, 
steel, the authority of the monarchy, the prestige of the 
army, the credulity and blind passions of the masses ex- 
ploited by a strong and unscrupulous oligarchy; the desire 
for moral independence which could only be hers with a 



ITALY'S FOREIGN POLICY 167 

more secure frontier, together with a somewhat vague but 
very real longing for a nobler, higher and happier life — 
all these causes impelled Italy to take part in the struggle. 
A coalition of various elements overcame the official oppo- 
sition to this act of sacrifice and put an end to the vacilla- 
tion of the masses. This coalition has been of the greatest 
service to Europe, but it has entailed grave responsibilities. 
Italy has pledged herself to her allies to induce the country 
to make the greatest possible effort in the common cause '^ 
and they have pledged themselves to give the' country, to- 
gether with its natural frontiers, a sure and lasting peace, 
moral independence and an existence free from the obses- 
sion of German example and influence. The coalition 
which willed the war might one day find itself in a perilous 
position should it fail to fulfil these pledges. It will fulfil 
the former, for, the masses, vacillating as they were up to 
the very declaration of war, have accepted the heavy sacri- 
fices asked of them with admirable courage and dignity. 
It is for the Allied Powers to help it to redeem the pledges 
it has given to the country, by taking into account the limits 
placed upon Italy's participation in the war by the circum- 
stances under which she entered it. It must never be for- 
gotten that the problem of war is not presented in the same 
way to the government of a country which has been forced 
to take up arms by brutal aggression, as to the government 
of a country which has desired war on political and national 
grounds which are always open to discussion. If the Allies 
bear this in mind, they will be better able to help the Italian 
government and be in turn helped by it to attain the common 
goal : the victory which will ensure to Europe a real, lasting 
and equitable peace. 



CHAPTER V 
The Genius of the Latin Peoples 



THE GENIUS OF THE LATIN PEOPLES 

I 

History is full of tragic surprises, but it is indubitable 
that no generation, . . . not even that which witnessed the 
stupendous upheaval of the French Revolution . . . has 
seen, as has ours, all its illusions and its hopes destroyed 
in a few weeks by a catastrophe more unexpected. 

It is not the war which has been the surprise. Even 
while hoping that the precarious and uneasy peace which 
Europe has enjoyed for more than forty years might be 
prolonged indefinitely, every one knew that war was one of 
the possibilities in the old continent. But no one expected 
to see overthrown, in a few weeks, the very foundations 
of the civilization which had sheltered us, with our posses- 
sions, under its protective roof. And yet we have seen the 
nations which were considered as the elite of humanity, who 
had exerted themselves to sweeten conduct to the extent 
of protecting horses in the street from the brutality of 
drunken carters, fling themselves on one another for a war 
of extermination. We have seen an age which had deified 
productive labour annihilate, in a few years, the wealth 
accumulated during generations. We have seen Europe 
which seemed to us a living unit animated by rivalries, if 
not courteous at least not mortal, divide itself all at once 
into two camps separated by an insuperable abyss, which 
can no longer exchange, across that abyss, but cannon shots 
and curses. There is no longer any way of understanding 
each other; for that which is the good on this side of the 
barrier is the evil on the other side. 

171 



172 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

If our hearts are wrung at seeing this youth mown down 
each day upon so many battle fields, the bloody sacrifice of 
a generation is yet, unhappily, but a part of this prodigious 
cataclysm, destined to change the course of history. It is 
consequently natural that men seek to understand its pro- 
found significance, and that they ask themselves what dan- 
gerous madness has impelled one of the most powerful 
nations of our epoch to risk its whole position, and unfor- 
tunately also the well-being and happiness of the whole 
of Europe, to possess itself, in a few weeks, of the empire 
of the world. For there is now no longer any doubt that 
the European war, in its origins and in the dark plans of 
the State which plotted it, was the audacious attempt to 
possess itself, by a coup-de-main, of a hegemony which 
would have delivered over to Germany at least the half 
of the world. One has only to follow up on the map the 
operations of the German army, from the violation of Bel- 
gian neutrality until the battle of the Marne, to understand 
that Germany attempted, in a few weeks, by a lightning- 
like surprise, to annihilate France ; to destroy for centuries, 
if not for all time, her riches, her power, her prestige. Nor 
is it any more uncertain, now, that, had this plan succeeded, 
neither England nor Russia alone would have been able to 
save Europe from the German supremacy; Europe would 
have fallen under the dominion, direct or indirect, of the 
Empire of the Hohenzollerns ; and how much time would 
have been required by a Germany, yet further extended, 
overlord of all the European continent, intoxicated by this 
new success, to prepare itself for a decisive struggle with 
England? . . . that is to say, for the conquest of a world 
supremacy? But it is also evident that a stroke of such 
audacity, if it did not succeed within a few weeks, would 



THE GENIUS OF THE LATIN PEOPLES 173 

set going a struggle for life or death among the greatest 
powers of Europe. 

So that the real problem of the European war seems to 
present itself thus: how was a nation, universally regarded 
as a brother of the great European family, able to conceive, 
at the dawn of the twentieth century, the idea of con- 
quering, by surprise, a decisive supremacy over all the other 
countries of the world, by destroying with fire and sword, 
in a few months, one of the most ancient, most glorious and 
most active centres of civilization; and how did it decide 
to stake all that is possessed, . . . that is to say, a very 
brilliant position, ... in this venture ? 

II 

For the last years the world has been in perplexity over 
this problem. The problem seems so much the more diffi- 
cult in that, for thirty years past, we were accustomed to 
attribute to Germany the genius of order. Germany, — 
that was order. It is for this reason that, in almost all 
countries, the upper classes felt for her a growing admira- 
tion. And behold, all at once, from one day to the next, 
without apparent reason, this pretended land of order throws 
the whole of Europe into the bloody chaos of this tremen- 
dous crisis, and reveals itself as the most astounding force 
of disorder that history has yet seen. The world has diffi- 
culty in comprehending a phenomenon so paradoxical. It 
will, however, appear simpler if one reflects a little upon 
order, upon what it is and upon the conception which we 
form for ourselves of it. It is evident that order is a very 
vague word and that it can signify many different things, 
according as it is employed by a gendarme or by a philoso- 



174 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

pher, by the Home secretary or by the head of a Christian 
church. But, in recent times, this elementary truth had 
been a Httle too much forgotten, and, thanks to that intel- 
lectual levity which held sway to some degree everywhere 
in Europe previous to the war, we had ended by believing 
that, where the government was disputed and unstable, dis- 
order must reign; and that one found oneself in the realm 
of order where the authority of the State was better obeyed. 
But this concept of order and disorder was too simple. 
Order is too complicated a phenomenon for us to be able 
to confide the task of defining it exclusively to the police, 
as this concept would assume. Order is also, . . and 
for my part I shall not hesitate to say is above all . . . 
the sense of the limits which a society ought not to over- 
pass if it does not wish to see reason transform itself into 
folly, truth transform itself into error, beauty transform 
itself into ugliness, good transform itself into evil. It is 
a law of the human mind, in every domain of practical and 
of spiritual life, that all effect, if it overpasses a certain 
limit, destroys itself, and, instead of attaining its end, 
engenders the most varied troubles and crises, becoming a 
disturbing element. There is nothing more noble in the 
world than the love of truth, of justice and of beauty. And 
yet all science which, having lost the sense of the limits 
of its powers, seeks to resolve insoluble problems, departs 
from the luminous sphere of reason and loses itself in the 
fog of chimeras, producing intellectual disorder. The 
states and religions which have demanded of their age too 
great a moral perfection, by means of methods of coercion 
too violent, have sometimes ended by sowing moral dis- 
order through provoking the most unexpected reactions of 
vice and crime. The divine force of art is originality, that 
privilege of genius which creates beauties yet unknown; 



THE GENIUS OF THE LATIN PEOPLES 175 

but originality has also its limits, for it risks, in overpassing 
them, falling into extravagance, into confusion, into the 
absurd. This law^ is even more obvious in the practical 
realm. It is a well known fact that nothing is so dangerous 
for any political or economic organization . . . whether a 
state, a party, an army, a bank, or a business ... as to 
engage in enterprises which are beyond its powers. The 
extreme limit of its powers is also the limit beyond which, 
for all human institutions, disintegration begins; that is to 
say, the incurable disorder which precedes death, slow or 
swift. 

This concept of order accepted, we can affirm without 
hesitation that the spirit of order is represented, in history, 
not by the Germanic genius, but by the Latin genius. From 
a certain point of view one can say that the Latin genius 
is essentially order in its highest possible concept, and that 
such little order as has reigned in the world has been its 
work. The political troubles which have agitated the Latin 
countries at different periods, and especially for the last 
hundred and thirty years, have not changed this profound 
characteristic of our spirit. It is always difficult to define 
the genius of a people, of a race or of a civilization. This 
genius is always a very complex force, which eludes precise 
definitions. It is never, moreover, constant and uniform in 
itself. All nations and all civilizations contradict them- 
selves in their history, by recurring, in certain periods, to 
the tendencies which dominated preceding epochs. But if 
one understands by the genius of a people or of a civiliza- 
tion its most persistent tendencies, to which the people or 
the civilization returns after inevitable fluctuations, one can 
say that the Latin genius, like the Greek genius to which it 
owes so much and which has been its master, is a genius 
par excellence limited, and in consequence orderly : and that 



170 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

it is a limited and ordered genius because, in its most bril- 
liant periods, it, like the Greek genius, set before itself, as 
an end to be attained, models of perfection, aesthetic, moral 
or intellectual, as defined as possible. Let us take Greece: 
why has she attained, in many arts and in certain forms of 
literature, so great a perfection, which has consecrated so 
many of her works as models that are always studied with 
profit? Because she succeeded in limiting the creative en- 
ergy of genius by traditions and by rules, and the force of 
the traditions and rules by the creative energy of genius. 
In all the arts, she has produced, in the most brilliant 
moments of her activity, great geniuses, who have been able 
to work within the limits of tradition and of rules strong 
enough to support them, but not so strong as to stifle them. 
In philosophy, Greece has produced all kinds of theories. 
All the conceptions, and even all the aberrations, to which 
the human mind reverts periodically, are there represented. 
But it is not by mere chance that one of the two great 
Greek philosophers whose work has come down to us almost 
entire, and who has exerted so great an influence upon the 
ancient world and upon the whole development of the Latin 
civilization, whether directly or through St. Thomas Aqui- 
nas, is Aristotle. Aristotle might be defined as the philoso- 
pher of limitation and of order par excellence. He began 
by limiting the universe, by reducing the world to a narrow 
enclosed system, contesting the astronomic theories which, 
in making the earth turn round the sun, would have exacted 
as corollary the infinity of space. He limited the develop- 
ment of the universe, by giving too all things a point of 
arrival which does not recede in proportion as they ap- 
proach it ; which is fixed and determinate ; its entelechie, the 
complete realization of its faculties or of its tendencies. He 
has founded morality on the idea that virtue is a mean be- 



THE GENIUS OF THE LATIN PEOPLES 177 

tween two extremes; and he has, consequently, admitted 
that no element of human nature is radically evil when it 
keeps to its own place; it only becomes so when it over- 
passes the limits assigned to it by nature. He has created 
a system of aesthetics which is, in the main, but a very 
subtle and ingenius philosophical justification of a certain 
number of rules which the taste of his epoch imposed upon 
the poets, writers, and orators ; that is to say, the philosoph- 
ical justification of the limits imposed by the Greek taste 
upon the originality of genius. He has, in short, created a 
system of politics which bases itself, ultimately, on the 
limitation of the population. Aristotle would find himself 
very much out of his reckoning in his political theories in 
the modern world, and above all in the countries where, as 
in Germany, the population swarms; for the State such 
as he conceives it requires, for its good government, a lim- 
ited and but little varying population. But what is the aim 
which this State, whose population is limited, ought to set 
before it? It is not the unlimited increase of power and 
wealth; it is virtue; that is to say, an ideal of moral per- 
fection. Virtue is the first care of a State which truly 
merits this title and which is not a State only in name. 

If ancient Greece possessed to so high a degree the sense 
of limits in the spiritual domain, Rome possessed it in the 
political domain. The phenomenon which is seemingly the 
strength in the history of Rome is the persistent spirit of 
opposition to territorial aggrandizements which dominated 
its policy after the conquest of Italy. So long as it was 
a question of conquering central and southern Italy, Rome 
proceeded, when she was able, with a sufficiently decided 
spirit of aggression; but so soon as it was a matter of 
overpassing the Apennines, the Alps and the sea, of found- 
ing the great Mediterranean empire which has had so great 



178 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

an influence on the history of Europe, she felt herself as it 
were paralysed by the very greatness of the opportunity 
which presented itself to her. Even during the centuries 
of the great conquests in Europe, in Asia and in Africa, 
the aristocracy which governed the empire was always 
opposed to the policy of annexations and of conquest. It 
is no exaggeration to say that Rome created her immense 
empire in spite of herself, forced by a sequence of events 
which was stronger than the will of her government, or by 
exceptional personalities such as C. Flaminius and Julius 
Caesar, who were not, moreover, much admired. The ad- 
miration of Julius Caesar is modern; the intellectual elite 
of his generation and of the succeeding generations felt 
towards him, rather, fear and distrust. This phenomenon 
seems bizarre and almost incomprehensible to an age like 
ours, where aggressive imperialism has enjoyed such high 
favour in all countries; but for him who looks from the 
Roman point of view the reason for this is clear. The 
Roman nobility knew that it was easier to conquer terri- 
tories than to keep them; it saw on all sides the ruins of 
empires which had fallen because they had wished to expand 
too much and too fast; it did not wish to risk too much 
for the conquest of an empire which it would not have 
the strength to keep. The Roman nobility, moreover, . . . 
and it is another characteristic which distinguishes it from 
the ruling classes of our age, . . . was never ambitious to 
make of Rome a state richer or more powerful than other 
states; It only wished, after having conquered Italy, that 
Rome might enjoy a certain security and that she might 
be governed according to certain principles which seemed 
to It, rightly or wrongly, to represent a perfect ideal of 
virtue and wisdom. In short, it put Into practice, to the 
best of its ability, the principle of Aristotle, that virtue is 



THE GENIUS OF THE LATIN PEOPLES 179 

the chief preoccupation of a state which merits that title. 
For centuries Rome found herself in contact with states 
which were richer, or more powerful, or more cultivated 
than herself; never was she envious of them, never did she 
feel herself humiliated by the comparison, nor obliged to 
seek to imitate them. She limited herself always to taking 
from the other peoples what seemed to her useful for her 
own conservation; but she sought, above all, not to com- 
promise that ideal of wisdom and virtue in which she saw 
the goal of all her effort. To remain faithful to that ideal, 
she preferred, during several centuries, to renounce con- 
quests and enrichments which would have been easy to her; 
which explains, for instance, why Paul Emilius, after hav- 
ing conquered Macedonia, closed all the gold mines and 
forbade their exploitation; which explains also why, at a 
certain moment, the Senate refused to accept Egypt, which 
the King had bequeathed it in his testament. Yet Egypt 
was considered the richest and most fertile country of the 
ancient world. But Rome refused it just because it was 
too rich. The traditionalist and puritan aristocracy feared 
lest these riches and the Egyptian examples might end by 
" corrupting " Rome ; that is to say, by divorcing the new 
generations from that ideal of moral perfection in which 
it believed, and which seemed to it essential for the main- 
tenance of the people in a state of moral vigour. The ideal 
of moral perfection prevailed over the ambition for power 
and the desire for wealth. This prudence also explains 
to us why, when she conquered a country, Rome asked 
nothing better than to let it live as it would, with its laws 
and its beliefs, mixing herself with its affairs as little as 
possible. Rome never dreamed of imposing her language, 
her manners, or her laws upon her subjects ; all the peoples 
who, under her rule, became Romanized freely and slowly, 



180 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

because they believed it advantageous to adopt the language 
and ideas of the dominant nation, Rome knew that she 
would not be able to impose her will upon all the subject 
peoples, and she preferred to leave them to govern them- 
selves. This prudence and these hesitations explain the 
slowness with which the Roman Empire was created, but 
it also explains its duration. 

Ill 

These examples show us the Latin genius, and the Greek 
genius, which has been the master of the Latin genius, in 
their characteristic manifestations, seeking, in art as in 
politics, in literature as in philosophy, order, measure, har- 
mony. Both the one and the other have supplied the models 
studied and imitated until two centuries ago, more or less 
well, by all the civilizations which have followed one another 
in Europe. One may say that the Latin spirit dominated 
Europe, although with some more or less grave lapses, 
until the end of the seventeenth century. L'^p to that period 
all the social organizations of Europe, diverse as they were 
in details, had yet a character which could be defined as 
Greco-Latin. They were all based upon the great pessimist 
doctrine which has been formulated under force so different 
by the religions and philosophies of the past, and according 
to which human nature is more prone to evil than to good. 
They deduced from this principle that it was necessary to 
distrust men, to multiply restraints and limits around their 
perverse instincts, to master their pride and cupidity. They 
sought to succeed in this partly by all kinds of moral and 
political coercion, partly by enjoining on the generations 
elevated ideals of perfection. All these civilizations were 
poor, were lacking in energy, and ignorant in comparison 



THE GENIUS OF THE LATIN PEOPLES 181 

with contemporary civilizations; they hmited their desires, 
their ambitions, their spirit of initiative, their audacity, their 
originaHty; they produced Httle and slowly, and even while 
suffering much from the insufficiency of their material re- 
sources, they considered the augmentation of wealth only' 
as a painful necessity. But they sought to attain to arduous 
standards of perfection . . . artistic, or Hterary, or moral, 
or religious. To make use once more of a formula which 
I have perhaps a little abused in these latter days, quality 
prevailed over quantity; all the limitations to which these 
civilizations submitted with so much patience were only the 
necessary price of these coveted perfections; in good as in 
evil, effort was made rather in the direction of depth than 
in that of extent. Rather than to generalize vices and 
virtues by extenuating them, these civilizations tended to 
create a small number of great villains, of great characters, 
of great scholars and of great artists. 

A conclusion thus forces itself upon us: it is that, if the 
Latin spirit had dominated the modern world as it dom- 
inated the ancient world, a catastrophe like this would not 
have been possible. Europe would have yet seen wars ; but 
she would not have seen armies so formidable, nor engines 
of war so murderous, nor proceedings so barbarous, nor so 
savage a fury of passions, nor a people dreaming of con- 
quering the empire of the world in a few weeks, nor the 
frightful disorder which that insane ambition would let 
loose Rome had shown, by a conclusive historical experi- 
ence, that the empire of the world cannot be, even where it 
is possible, but the slow and patient work of centuries. But 
then another question arises : for what reason has the Latin 
spirit no longer today the influence over the world which 
it had formerly? What new force has replaced it? Why, 
to these limited and ordered civilizations has there succeeded 



Igg EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

a social state which can give birth to such cataclysm ? What 
has happened in the world? An immense revolution . . , 
the greatest perhaps that men have ever seen . . . and which 
has overthrown in two centuries the world wherein our 
ancestors lived, I believe that it is not possible to under- 
stand the import of modem life if one has not understood 
the magnitude of that revolution; and one cannot under- 
stand it if one has not an exact idea of the civilizations 
which have preceded our own. Classic culture, if it should 
succeed in freeing itself from the German influence which, 
at least in Italy, has dominated it owing to the baneful in- 
fluence of the universities, ought to serve, above all today, 
to make modern civilization in its essential difference under- 
stood by an exact knowledge of ancient civilizations. In 
what does this difference consist ? An enthusiastic optimist 
has succeeded, during the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- 
turies, and with the aid of favourable circumstances, in con- 
vincing a part of humanity that human nature is inherently 
good in itself; that, delivered from all the restraints with 
which laws and religions had surrounded it, abandoned to 
its instincts, it would continually better itself, and would 
create happiness around it, by a kind of interior law. All 
the means of coercion, of which former ages made use so 
largely to subdue the evil tendencies of human nature, have 
been mitigated or destroyed ; man has conquered liberty ; he 
has permitted his will and his intelligence to develop to the 
extreme limit of his energy and power of action; he has 
created science, conquered the earth and the air, subjugated 
nature. . . . But he has been forced to abandon or lower 
almost all the ideals of artistic, moral or religious perfec- 
tion venerated by our ancestors; forced everywhere to sac- 
rifice quality to quantity. . . . History has thus changed 
its course ; a new world has come into being, in which cer- 



THE GENIUS OF THE LATIN PEOPLES 183 

tain principles of life seem to have been reversed. Was 
this new world better or worse than the old ? For the last 
century we do nothing but discuss this problem, under a 
thousand different forms, and, for the most part, without 
being aware of it, in our quarrels, political, religious, philo- 
sophical. This problem underlies all these quarrels. But 
the question, thus stated, is insoluble. For the two con- 
ceptions of life, being partial, have their true side and their 
false side, their weaknesses and their strong points. The 
ancient has given to the world incomparable master-pieces, 
great philosophers, great religions. It has also given hor- 
rible tyrannies and fetters very heavy to bear. It has 
divided men into a great number of small isolated and 
antagonistic groups; but it has given birth, in the midst 
of all these enmities, to the most sublime among the doc- 
trines of love and charity that man has ever known. The 
modern conception has bestowed on man much liberty, do- 
minion over all the earth, a fabulous wealth and power. 
But it has too much mixed up, and confounded, in a kind 
of fog, the distinctions between truth and error, between 
beauty and ugliness, between good and evil. And it is in 
this confusion that three generations have sown with con- 
fidence the noblest ideas of fraternity and love, to gather the 
bloody harvest of this gigantic war! 

IV 

The present catastrophe is, in reality, only the final out- 
come of a gigantic but confused effort accomplished by 
four or five generations who have thought only of aug- 
menting the power of man, without distinguishing between 
the power which creates and that which destroys ; who have 
considered it equally progressive to construct steamboats as 



184. EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

to build dreadnoughts, to construct railroads as to construct 
monstrous cannons or to invent terrifying explosives; who, 
although not repudiating the moral traditions of the past, 
have left full liberty to all the passions which could stimulate 
human activity, even to those which seemed the most dan- 
gerous to the predominating morality of past ages, such as 
pride and cupidity. Our age has demanded of men three 
things : activity, patriotism, and the docility to economic and 
political discipline which great industrial civilization re- 
quires. Outside of these three virtues it has not imposed 
with vigour any moral law, either upon private or upon col- 
lective life. Beneath its apparent unity the world had ended 
by concealing a restless chaos of opposing interests, of pas- 
sions and of ideas, in which the Latin genius, which is a 
genius of order, of reason and of perspicuity, has ever felt 
itself a little misplaced; whereas the German genius, re- 
maining turbulent and uneven, delighted in it as in its ele- 
ment, and grew, in it, over-excited to the pitch of preparing, 
in silence, for the unsuspecting world the formidable sur- 
prise of this war. All the tragedy of our age lies in this 
contradiction; and no country has felt it, has suffered by 
it, as has France, which had remained the most loyal to the 
Latin tradition in the midst of the tremendous shocks of 
the last two centuries. The political convulsions which 
have shaken her during these last hundred and thirty years 
have caused many people to think that France was the great 
centre of disorder in Europe. It is to be presimied that 
the European War will have proved to the most obstinate 
that the centre of disorder was elsewhere. Even at the 
very height of its gravest political crises France did not 
cease to be, to such a degree as this was yet possible, an 
element of order in Europe, because she has been, among 
the great nations of Europe, the one which has preserved 



THE GENIUS OF THE LATIN PEOPLES 185 

to the highest degree the two quahties which are the con- 
dition of true order: the sense of limits, and the aspiration 
towards a qualitative civilization. One might even go 
further, and say that the agitations and revolutions from 
which France has suffered during more than a century, and 
which have caused her to be considered as the greatest focus 
of disorder, proceeded, at least in part, from the discrep- 
ancy existing between the tendencies of the epoch and her 
spirit of order, " France," . . . and I here ask your per- 
mission to quote a page written by myself ; not that it pos- 
sesses any special value, but because it was written previous 
to the war. ..." France, in effecting the Revolution, gave 
the coup de grace to the limited civilization of our fathers. 
It was not of set purpose, but in thinking of and aiming 
at something else, that she dealt the blow; and this is so 
true that she has since continued, and, perhaps alone in 
the world, she yet aspires, to produce excellence, to be of 
worth, and to assert herself through quality rather than 
through quantity. But excellence cannot multiply itself so 
quickly, so easily, and in so large a degree as the mediocre 
and the bad. And so it is that the nation which did not 
tremble before Europe in arms, which dared to defy God 
and instal Reason on His throne, hesitates, takes alarm, is 
terrified at the ever-growing figures read in the statistics of 
its neighbours ; and it no longer knows whether it is in de- 
cline or if it marches as the head of the nations ; and some- 
times it is proud of itself, sometimes is discouraged; has 
the sense of being isolated ; asks itself : * what is to be done? 
Resist to the death the universal triumph of quantity? Or 
utterly abandon the ancient tradition and Americanize one- 
self like the rest?' Often when I come to Paris I go, at 
sunset, up the Avenue des Champs Elysees towards the Arc 
de Triomphe. ... Do you know what, for some time past, 



186 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

I cannot help thinking when I walk along that avenue? I 
think of the statistics of the production of iron in Ger- 
many. A million and a half tons in 1870; two millions in 
1875; three in 1880; nearly five in 1890; eight and a half 
in 1900 ; eleven in 1905 ; nearly fifteen in 1910 ! My friends, 
believe me ; it was on the day when Apollo made his speech 
in Olympus that there began between him and Vulcan the 
war which is let loose today in the whole world. Who will 
prevail? Iron is incontestably a precious metal; railways 
and machines have been made of it ; cannons, guns, breast- 
plates have been made of it. But to encumber the world 
with iron to the point of driving out beauty from this 
earth, and all the qualities which reveal the mobility and 
greatness of the human spirit, is not this to lead the world 
back to barbarism ? Who will prevail ? Vulcan or Apollo ? 
Quantity or quality ? " 

The struggle between the two gods of Olympus, which I 
had dreaded during my journeys in America, has assumed 
all of a sudden a form most violent and terrible. One day, 
suddenly, in this chaos of conflicting interests, passions 
and opinions in which we live, pride, ambition, and the 
spirit of violence prevailed. The nation which had made 
a superficial age believe that it represented the spirit of 
order in the world has, seized with a fit of madness which 
was the logical outcome of its pride and cupidity, thrown 
Europe and half the world into the disorder of an unprec- 
edented historic crisis. Since that day we dwell upon an 
earth which quakes; and as if, from one moment to the 
next, the sky would fall upon our heads. The sky will 
not fall upon our heads ; but it would be difficult to foresee 
the future which awaits our civilization if it does not suc- 
ceed in regaining once more, in the quest for new aesthetic 
and moral perfections, a surer sense of limits. Is the prob- 



THE GENIUS OF THE LATIN PEOPLES 187 

lem which the war presents to Europe anything, indeed, but 
a problem of Hmits? It presents it to all under a material 
and geographical form. There are some nations which 
have emerged from their frontiers and invaded the terri- 
tories of their neighbours ; there are others who struggle to 
drive back the invaders and to conquer frontiers which shall 
protect them for the future from fresh outrages. But if it 
be necessary, before all, to drive back the horde, so soon as 
possible, into the territory from which it ought never to 
have issued forth, to drive it back is not sufficient. It is 
necessary to create in Europe a political situation and a 
moral state which shall prevent the turbulent genius of the 
Germanic peoples from again filling the pages of history 
with a second venture of this kind. Together with the 
question of geographic and political limits, there is a ques- 
tion of moral limits; the greatest, perhaps, that has ever 
been presented to man: the question as to the limits which 
states, nations, economic interests, intellectual cultures, shall 
know how to set to their ambition, their activity, their spirit 
of competition and of conquest. For the whole question 
lies in that. The European War shows that modern civili- 
zation is yet more powerful than even its most ardent admir- 
ers had thought it. No one, I believe, would have dared two 
years ago to prophesy that the greatest states of Europe 
would be able to endure for years a war of this magnitude. 
It is unquestionable that men had never achieved a more 
stupendous effort. But just because one part of humanity 
has arrived at a degree of power which had never been 
attained, the question today is to know to what use it 
intends to put that force. Does it intend to yield it as a 
Wind instrument of destruction to pride, to cupidity, to 
ambition, so that they may periodically precipitate crises 
such as that which today agitates the world? Or will it 



188 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

desire to make use of it solely in definite directions and 
for aims which shall be in accord with a high and noble 
ideal of life? Will it succeed, in short, in imposing on its 
tremendous force some moral limits, . . . and what? 

There is no doubt that the future of Europe depends upon 
this alternative. It is difficult to believe that the masses 
would adapt themselves indefinitely to regard, as the final 
expression of progress, a state of things by which, period- 
ically, two generations should work tenaciously so as to 
afford to the third the means of exterminating itself. The 
world in which we live, huge and powerful, but unbalanced 
and full of confusion, requires a little more order, harmony, 
justice, beauty and measure. The crisis in which Europe 
is struggling proves clearly that, if we do not succeed in 
raising the moral tone of European life, the civilization of 
sword and science will end in a kind of gigantic suicide. 
The task which awaits Europe, on the morrow of the war, 
is, then, very difficult; for it is a matter of nothing less 
than attempting to profound, serious, organic reconciliation 
between what is most noble and most beautiful from the 
moral, religious and intellectual point of view in the quali- 
tative civilizations of the past, and the new forces created 
by our age, such as industrialism and democracy. We have, 
hitherto, set side by side and jumbled up all these contra- 
dictory elements ; it is necessary to blend them. Now these 
adjustments, when they are not superficial hoaxes, but seri- 
ous attempts to lead men to accomplish their duties better, 
are always very difficult, demanding a great spirit of sacri- 
fice, a great moral energy, the ardent faith in an ideal. 
Our age, moreover, has achieved things too great, and 
obtained too much success in over-passing all the limits 
respected by our ancestors, not to feel a strong attraction 
towards the limitless greatness of quantity, towards all that 



THE GENIUS OF THE LATIN PEOPLES 189 

is colossal, unbalanced, enormous, violent. The task then 
will be difficult. . . . But if human nature has not changed; 
if beauty, reason, virtue, have not lost their eternal forces 
of attraction for the soul, the task should be possible and 
glorious. It is not conceivable that Europe will emerge 
from this crisis without understanding that there are, in 
contemporary civilization, some excesses which we must 
correct under pain of seeing all our efforts periodically 
annihilated by catastrophes. It is the struggle between the 
two Gods of Olympus; between the God who forges the 
iron and the God who knows the laws of the necessary pro- 
portions between the elements of life; that is to say, the 
secret of health, of beauty, of truth, of virtue; it is this 
struggle which has provoked the immense moral crisis from 
which the war has ensued. We, the Latin nations, have 
suffered more than the other nations from this moral crisis 
. . . for we were especially devotees of the God who is 
the august guardian of measure. The solution of this 
great moral crisis would be compensation to us for the 
sacrifices which this crisis in history imposes on us; and 
no country would have so well deserved it as France, which 
has made the greatest sacrifices. Like all the foreigners 
whose hearts are wrung by the thought of all that France 
has suffered and will suffer in this war, I ardently hope that 
it will usher in in Europe an epoch in which the Latin 
genius will be able to shine with its full radiance, in a world 
which will understand what is order, harmony, reason, hu- 
manity, better than the last generation had understood. 
France is entitled to this recompense for the terrible sacri- 
fices that she endures with so much steadfastness; and 
history will bestow it upon her, to her glory and for the 
happiness of the world. 



CHAPTER VI 
The Intellectual Problems of the New World 



THE INTELLECTUAL PROBLEMS OF THE 
NEW WORLD 



There is perhaps nothing which will surprise the historians 
of the European War more than the general reconciliation 
of parties and opinions by which its outbreak was followed. 
Strange as such a statement may appear, there can be no 
doubt that Europe enjoyed internal peace for the first time 
during the greatest war history has ever known. The most 
bitter religious, political and intellectual feuds were for- 
gotten in the space of a few short days from end to end 
of a continent which for three centuries had never ceased 
to afford the world a spectacle of ever recurring conflicts. 
This extraordinary phenomenon has been one of the 
greatest surprises of the war. At the same time it is one 
which readily admits of explanation. Every country 
realized immediately that union of strength was absolutely 
necessary, since not merely its prestige or the possession 
of some special territory, but its very life was at stake. 
Undoubtedly this explanation is true as far as it goes, but 
it does not go far enough. The phenomenon is in reality 
more complex and attributable to causes which lie deeper. 
Reconciliation is almost always a very difficult matter when 
it has to deal with animosities fostered and intensified by 
long centuries of conflict; on this occasion, however, 
it was comparatively easy, because the European War in- 
A^olved in serious difficulties all the parties and schools of 
thought which had striven so fiercely for the mastery in time 
of peace. Much as each party or the adherents of each 

193 



194) EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

school of thought would have enjoyed casting their op- 
ponents' mistakes in their teeth, they preferred to forgive, 
seeing that the arguments of each and every party might be 
turned against it. 

A few examples will make this clear. What Pacifist 
would today venture to assert that universal peace is the 
necessary result of the evolution of modern society? 
Such Utopian theories have been carried away in a deluge 
of blood. On the other hand, what opponent of pacifism 
would dare to avow that when he maintained the necessity 
of war, he had in his mind a war which knows no limits 
whether of space, time, destruction of life and property, 
or the unscrupulousness of its methods? If events have 
proved the Pacifists to be in the wrong, they have so far 
transcended the predictions of their opponents as to pre- 
clude any possibility of triumph for the advocates of war. 
It is of course clear that those who, at a time when Ger- 
many was arming herself to the teeth, demanded the re- 
duction of armaments, were mistaken; they were, how- 
ever, right when they asserted that modern armies were 
being developed beyond the limits set by nature to this 
organ of the social body. It is, moreover, evident that 
one reason why we have returned to the war of position 
is the enormous size of modern armies and the complicated 
nature and destructive power of their weapons. The war 
of manoeuvre demands armies which are relatively small 
in comparison to their field of action, can be readily moved 
about and the range of whose weapons does not exceed a 
certain limit. But how can a war of position, which lasts 
for years, in an age when armies are composed of all able 
bodied men between eighteen and fifty years of age, fail 
to lead to a universal cataclysm? The actual outbreak 
of the European War proved the Pacifists in the wrong, 



PROBLEMS OF THE NEW WORLD 195 

but its course has shown them to be right in declaring 
that Europe's vast armed hosts would not ensure her peace 
and would make the next war an appalling social catas- 
trophe. It must indeed be admitted that their pessimistic 
predictions fell short of the truth, for no Pacifist ever so 
much as dreamed of so long and terrible a conflict. 

If we turn our attention to the relation between the 
European War and the political doctrines which divided 
Europe before the war, we shall find the same contradic- 
tion. Germany had many admirers all over the world, 
more especially in the upper classes, simply because she 
represented, or seemed to represent, the principle of author- 
ity and order. Her government was indeed, as we know 
to our cost, the strongest in Europe, the only one perhaps 
which did not as yet stand in awe of those whom it was 
supposed to rule. It was able to take the initiative in this 
war and to inflict this appalling scourge upon the world just 
because it was so strong and could exercise such unlimited 
authority over its people. This fact will in the eyes of 
several generations lessen the prestige still enjoyed by 
strong, autocratic governments. The existence of the prin- 
ciple of order cannot be admitted in a system which brought 
this overwhelming disaster upon the world, and, whatever 
may have been the mistakes and weaknesses of the demo- 
cratic and parliamentary governments of western Europe 
— and they were only too numerous — posterity will judge 
them leniently, since these governments would never have 
involved the world in this war, or violated the neutrality 
of Belgium, or waged war in so barbarous a manner. At 
the same time the world will be forced to recognize that 
a little more farsightedness before the war and a little more 
rapidity, energy and intelligence in its prosecution, would 
have been of material service to these governments. It is 



196 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

fairly safe to predict that all the nations concerned will 
issue from the war more or less dissatisfied with their re- 
spective governments, for one reason or another. Seeing, 
however, that every civilized form of government is rep- 
resented among the belligerent states, the European War 
is hardly likely to furnish any decisive argument in favour 
of any one such form; it is more likely to emphasize the 
weak points of all the various systems which Europe has 
created and tried in the hope of finding the one most nearly 
approaching perfection. 

The same thing applies to the much disputed subject of 
protection and free trade. It is difficult to say which of 
these two theories, each of which has had such ardent 
partisans during the last century, is likely to gain by the 
experiences of the war, which seems to prove protection 
and free trade to be equally necessary and equally danger- 
ous. Has it not shown conclusively that national defence 
is impossible without the support of certain industries which 
must consequently be artificially furthered if they fail to 
develop naturally? It is obvious today that absolute free 
trade would put certain European countries at the mercy 
of others from a military point of view, but it is no 
less clear that the increasing difficulties with which all the 
belligerents have to cope are partly due to the hindrances 
placed in the way of international commerce by the war. 
Food supply difficulties have exercised great influence on 
the course of the war and are likely to influence its out- 
come, but these difficulties are merely the result of the sup- 
pression of free trade. Just as absolute free trade would 
have placed certain countries at the mercy of others, the 
blockade, that is to say, the suppression of exchange, will 
be one of the causes of the eventual capitulation of the 



PROBLEMS OF THE NEW WORLD 197 

Central Empires. Even in this problem, we find ourselves 
faced by an insoluble contradiction. 



II 

There would be no difficulty in finding other examples. 
Any thoughtful man who turns his attention towards the 
events of the present day and the discussions to which they 
give rise, will easily find other instances to which these 
reflections apply and understood why so many sworn foes 
have agreed to sink their differences. The various political 
parties suddenly found themselves face to face and with- 
out weapons of defence. The war has had the effect of 
a philosophic earthquake, shaking to their very founda- 
tions the most diametrically opposed ideas or at all events 
those which claimed to solve the most urgent problems of 
contemporary life. It is a phenomenon unique in the his- 
tory of the world and one which is worthy the attention 
of all thoughtful minds not wholly absorbed by the military 
situation, just as financiers are already turning their atten- 
tion to the taxation and commercial treaties of the future. 
This intellectual upheaval is indeed a far more serious 
problem than the destruction of wealth and probably no less 
so than the destruction of so many human lives which 
were the hope and mainstay of Europe. This upheaval 
will probably be the point of departure of that great crisis 
of modern civilization of which the world war is but the 
prologue — a crisis which promises to be universal, 
economic, intellectual and moral. In order to realize the 
truth of this, we have only to consider the position after 
the conclusion of peace of the institutions, parties and 
theories of which the war has shown the weak points and 



198 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

falsified the predictions. These institutions, political par- 
ties and theories, which ruled European society with vary- 
ing degrees of success before the war, will find themselves, 
as it were, in an empty void, and the probable consequences 
of such a position and the moral crisis resulting from it 
are easily divined. Hence it is important to seek its causes. 
How was it possible for so learned and powerful a civiliza- 
tion to be suddenly confronted with events which falsified 
so many of its beliefs, shattered so many of its hopes and 
proved all it had thought and accomplished during two 
generations to be erroneous? How could it fall into so 
gross an error? 

Ill 

The answer to this question is simple. The error was 
possible because our civilization had too many aims and, 
by striving to attain them all at the same time, had lost the 
power of selection. This expression may seem obscure, but 
I will endeavour to explain it by choosing the most obvious 
of the numerous examples which lie to hand : the way in 
which Europe had faced and solved one of those great 
problems which have engaged the attention of every success- 
ive generation — the problem of peace and war. In every 
age there have been discussions as to peace and war, their 
nature and the part they play in the world. In every age 
there have been men who looked upon perpetual peace as 
the highest good and others who regarded law as the divine 
law of life. Without entering into the discussion of this 
subject, we may safely assert that there have been periods 
when the principle of war has prevailed and others when 
that of peace has been predominant ; that both have accom- 
plished great things and that both have at a given moment 



PROBLEMS OF THE NEW WORLD 199 

passed through a crisis determined by the development of 
the principle which had guided them. If it be admitted 
that each state is a sovereign will, which neither can nor 
should recognize any limit to its liberty save the greater 
strength of another state, the principle of war will prevail. 
Each state will strive to be as strong as possible; it will 
turn every citizen into a soldier; it will avoid contact with 
other states, that is to say, with those other sovereign wills 
which are fated to come into collision with its own will 
m the course of time ; it will be hostile to everything which 
tends to make the peoples of different countries expand and 
fuse their interests : i.e., to commerce, treaties, international 
marriages and the adoption of foreign customs. It will 
act upon what I may call the principles of narrow national- 
ism on which the cities of ancient times were founded; 
the system prevalent in part of the classical world before 
the Pax Romana. It cannot be said that this regime is in 
Itself opposed to human nature or radically bad, when we 
reflect how much was accomplished by ancient civilizations 
under it, but if, on the other hand, it be admitted that each 
state is subject to a higher law of fraternity, charity and 
moral perfection, of which it is but the instrument, political 
and military organization will lose much of its importance 
and the necessity of fulfiling this higher duty will lead men 
to fuse their interests, ideas and sentiments. We have an 
example of this, due to the influence of Christianity, in 
mediaeval Europe. The peoples of Europe had almost 'en- 
tirely lost their political and military spirit: they were no 
longer capable of organizing a great state ; their wars, which 
occupy so large a place in our modern histories, were mere 
child's play, since they did not know how to raise even a 
small army and had lost the art of strategy. The intellect- 
ual and moral frontiers between nations had vanished and 



200 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

given place to a cosmopolitanism of which Latin was the 
official language. The disadvantages of cosmopolitanism 
were indoubtedly great, but here again the system cannot 
be condemned as in itself opposed to human nature or 
radically bad. The Middle Ages were amongst the greatest 
periods in the history of Europe — a period to which we are 
immensely indebted. It gradually populated countries 
which the upheavals following the fall of the Roman Empire 
had depopulated ; it brought many barbarians under the in- 
fluence of civilization; it brought forth marvellous arts — 
architecture, for instance. Moreover, it was under this 
regime of political cosmopolitanism that Europe began that 
magnificent work of exploration which has made the whole 
world ours. 

It is therefore clear that man can live under either a 
national or a cosmopolitan regime and neither will prevent 
his contributing his quota to that great and mysterious task 
of history whose purpose we vainly seek to read. Both sys- 
tems have their weak points and drawbacks ; like all things 
human, they have their limits and at some given time they 
become exhausted; they may, however, none the less be of 
service to what we somewhat vaguely term the progress of 
the world, provided that man makes a definite choice between 
them and accepts all their inevitable disadvantages. The 
inhabitants of classical cities did not aspire to the advantages 
of cosmopolitanism, just as the peoples of the Middle Ages 
resigned themselves to the drawbacks of political dismem- 
berment and disarmament. The weakness of the individual 
state was an essential condition of the cosmopolitanism of 
the Middle Ages, just as the spirit of exclusion was an 
essential condition of Sparta and Rome. Where our age 
has failed is in its inability to choose between two principles 
and two systems. By developing to the utmost a movement 



PROBLEMS OF THE NEW WORLD 201 

which began in the seventeenth century, it has confused 
these two distinct principles, just as if it were possible for 
them to develop side by side without the time ever coming 
when one of them would say to the other : " Thus far and 
no farther," thus making a choice absolutely unavoidable. 
It had apparently adopted the principle of peace. The vari- 
ous states of Europe, large and small alike, had made end- 
less treaties and agreements. They had all allowed for- 
eigners to reside, move about freely, own property, engage 
in commerce and marry within their borders. They had 
done everything in their power to encourage the exchange 
of capital, merchandise, ideas, discoveries and tastes. We 
had ceased to possess an international language like Latin, 
but there was more study of languages, and important books 
were translated into all the leading languages. Interna- 
tionalism was ostentatiously advocated by certain political 
parties and an international organization of interests had 
come into existence which was to a certain extent the neces- 
sary condition of the interior well-being of each nation. 
The Great Powers of Europe had moreover recognized of- 
ficially, though with varying degrees of good faith, the 
maintenance of peace as the end and object of their policy — ~ 
an aim to which everything else was to be subordinate. Our 
age had indeed created a cosmopolitanism which in certain 
respects recalled the Middle Ages. The logical consequence 
was that the opposite principle of war should have been so 
limited that wars endangering this international order, this 
comity of nations, by their length, their extent or their dura- 
tion would be absolutely impossible. This was not the case. 
A political organization of the Great Powers, recalling in 
many ways the nationalism and belligerent spirit of the cities 
of ancient times, but on a far vaster scale, was grafted on 
to this cosmopolitanism. The Great European Powers for 



202 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

various reasons vied with each other in the increase of arma- 
ments such as the world had never seen — armaments which 
turned war into a duel a outrance, just as in the days when 
each state looked upon each of its neighbours as an enemy. 
In almost every country national pride, suspicion or hatred 
of neighbouring peoples, the spirit of jealousy and rivalry, 
the desire to be the first in everything were all sedulously 
fostered, just as though we were living in a perpetual state 
of war. In the most powerful military empire of Europe 
we have even seen the development of a school enjoying 
official protection, which preached to an unprotesting world 
the doctrine of war knowing neither law nor limit, contempt 
for treaties, the divine nature of force and the uselessness 
of the rights of civilians. This school, intoxicated by 
official protection and the admiration of the world, ended by 
making Germany ready to make war upon the most highly 
civilized nations of Europe, her best customers and most 
sincere admirers, with the ferocity of African savages be- 
fore they came under European rule. It is no exaggeration 
to say that the nationalism grafted by Europe on to the in- 
terests and aspirations of cosmopolitanism was far bolder 
and far more dangerous than the nationalism of the ancient 
world, which did at all events recognize the sanctity of 
treaties. A treaty was a sacred thing, placed under the pro- 
tection of the divinity, and binding the contracting parties 
unconditionally. A state which desired to violate a treaty 
had to try and prove that it was really being true to it, since 
it would have been an unheard of thing for it to declare that 
it no longer intended to carry it out because it no longer 
served its purposes, a theory which it was reserved for twen- 
tieth century Europe to teach in its universities — a theory 
evolved in Germany, of course, but received favourably even 



PROBLEMS OF THE NEW WORLD 203 

in the universities of those countries which are now fighting 
against her. 

IV 

It is obvious enough today that if peace and war be two 
natural conditions of human nature, we have, by our unwise 
confusion of the principles of peace and war, invented a 
liigh explosive which has ended by destroying Europe. 
Europe had, however, gradually become so used to this 
unique and paradoxical situation that she looked upon it as 
quite natural. The various efforts made to rouse her to 
a realization of her imminent peril all failed. This illusion 
was after all but a special instance of a more universal 
illusion to which our civilization fell victim, which was the 
foundation of our whole mode of thought and of our con- 
ception of the world, and will probably be looked upon by 
our grandchildren as positively childish: i. e., the illusion 
that man can have anything in the world without its corre- 
sponding drawbacks — the advantages of war and the bene- 
fits of peace ; both power and perfection, both quantity and 
quality, both speed and beauty. Our age is the most learned 
which the world has ever seen, but, in spite of its immense 
learning, it had contrived to forget one very simple truth 
which far more ignorant peoples have borne in mind : that 
the good things of this world are so intimately interrelated 
that it is impossible to enjoy them all at the same time for 
an indefinite period. A moment invariably comes when 
one becomes the limit of the other and a choice must be 
made between them. This simple truth, of which we lost 
sight in our quest of power and riches, is the key to the 
whole of the vast tragedy which the world finds so hard to 
understand. The contradiction between the two principles 



204. EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

of peace and war which we have studied has not been the 
only error into which our age has fallen. But for the limi- 
tations of space, we might analyse in like manner the anti- 
thesis between the other principles of which we have spoken : 
liberty and authority, tradition and progress, ethics and eco- 
nomic interests. We should find everywhere, when compar- 
ing our age with its predecessors, the same phenomenon : 
the attempt to reconcile two irreconcilable principles instead 
of assigning definite limits to each and then choosing be- 
tween them. Our epoch, which was the first to attempt this 
compromise, has done so in every sphere : in politics, ethics, 
law, and even in art. Those who deplore the decadence of 
art in the modern world are constantly told that no other 
age has so striven to understand and appreciate the most 
widely different schools, styles and artists. The remark 
itself is true enough, but the conclusion drawn from it is 
not equally so, since this endeavour to admire everything 
results from an inability to make a definite choice peculiar 
to our day. The ages which gave birth to the greatest works 
of art were limited in their tastes. When artistic taste com- 
prehends so many different styles, it becomes feeble and 
superficial and ends in becoming mere dilettantism which 
weakens the creative power of the artist when he has not 
the strength to rise above the caprices of fashion. The 
effects of this inability to choose are, however, nothing like 
as injurious to art as to law, politics and ethics. The en- 
feeblement of governments, their inconsistencies, the irri- 
tability and uncertainty of public opinion in every country, 
the short-sighted fatalism prevalent before the war, the in- 
toxication of public opinion in Germany, are one and all the 
offspring of this intellectual and moral confusion. When 
an age ceases to be governed by clear and definite principles, 
its actions will be either slow and uncertain or violent and 



PROBLEMS OF THE NEW WORLD 205 

passionate, and Europe before the war was in both these 
frames of mind. A nation which was a prey to diaboHc 
pride, unlimited greed, unbounded confidence in its own 
strength and superiority, was surrounded by vacillating, per- 
plexed peoples, conscious of their own weakness and of the 
peril threatening them, but unable to do anything to avert 
the dreaded catastrophe and even, from time to time, de- 
ceiving themselves into thinking that the frenzy of their 
dangerous neighbour could be held in check by smiles and 
concessions. The intellectual and moral confusion, which 
dominated our epoch and made a course of action having 
definite aims and dictated by definite principles an im- 
possibility, had brought about two opposite results : an ever 
increasing frenzy in Germany and an ever increasing dis- 
quietude in every other country, and it was inevitable that 
this frenzy should one day break out openly in central 
Europe and claim as its victims the perplexed peoples of 
the neighbouring lands. 

V 

How could such an enlightened epoch as our own cherish 
the delusion that it is possible to possess everything at the 
same time? What part was played in the great drama of 
modern history by that inability to choose which resulted 
from this illusion and is characteristic of our age? Here 
we ha-ve the great problem which Europe must face once 
more and endeavour to solve definitely after the war, when 
so many institutions and theories which seemed founded 
upon the rock will prove to have been built upon the sand. I 
said that Europe must face this problem once more and en- 
deavour to solve it definitely, because it has been continually 
discussed under the most varied forms during the last cen- 
tury. The two solutions found seem, however, to have been 



206 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

mere makeshifts, since one of them regarded this confusion 
merely as an aberration of minds led astray by pride and 
false doctrine, while the other looked upon it as a higher 
condition, a kind of perfection attained at last by part of 
the human race. The time has perhaps come when man 
will more readily realize the inadequacy of both these solu- 
tions. It is not difficult to prove that, far from being a 
mere collective aberration, this confusion was the condition 
of an immense effort made by the two last centuries. It 
must not be forgotten, if we would understand the modern 
world and its crises, that Europe has for two hundred years 
been engaged upon two gigantic tasks without precedent in 
history. She has been striving to organize society and the 
state on wholly new principles, such as the will of the people, 
liberty, the concept of progress, nationality and its rights, 
and she was at the same time endeavouring to populate the 
whole earth and turn it to account with the help of marvel- 
lous instruments, thus making the whole world one. In 
order to succeed in both these tasks she had to stimulate 
the energy, initiative, activity and capacity for work of 
every class, — an unceasing effort which has been consider- 
ably furthered by the illusion that man can have all the good 
things of this world at the same time, and by the mental 
fog which leads him to confuse beauty and ugliness, good 
and evil, truth and error. Men and ages alike, when aiming 
at rapid and continual success, are fond of imagining them- 
selves omnipotent and are unwilling to be hampered by 
definite ethical, logical or aesthetic principles, which, while 
sure rules of conduct, are also definite limitations. A civil-, 
ization which aimed at the rapid creation of wealth, insti- 
tutions, conceptions, theories, machinery and new nations, 
was bound to hate all modes of thought and all laws which 
would have hampered it and to adopt standards sufficiently 



PROBLEMS OF THE NEW WORLD 207 

flexible to approve as good and beautiful everything which 
favoured its many and varied interests. 

This confusion, which has been considered a mere aberra- 
tion, was therefore the essential condition of what we have 
rightly or wrongly called the progress of our age. Must we 
then conclude that those who regarded this confusion as a 
state of perfection were in the right? In default of other 
reasons, the crisis of so many institutions and opposing doc- 
trines, which began with the European War, would be 
enough to make us doubt it. If the principles of authority 
and liberty, of pacifism and militarism, of nationalism and 
cosmopolitanism, have all alike been affected by the war, it 
would be absurd to conclude that they are all alike false and 
that they must one and all disappear. They are all prin- 
ciples which have ruled human society and it is obvious 
that they must continue to do so, since it is impossible to con- 
ceive of a state not dominated by one or other of them. 
What else is then proved by this universal crisis of necessary 
institutions and doctrines but that we must no longer strive 
to reconcile and blend opposing principles as we have hith- 
erto done ; that we must no longer desire peace and prepare 
for war at the same time, multiply the prerogatives of the 
state and diminish its authority and its prestige, worship 
both right and force and confuse success with perfection? 

VI 

We see then that there are numerous indications that the 
time is approaching when Europe will have to choose one 
of the various principles which she had confounded. If this 
be the case, we can also see what a tremendous intellectual 
task will fall to the lot of the new world, which will have to 
substitute systems of philosophy, ethics, politics, law and 



208 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

religion, schools of art and learning whose aim it will be to 
distinguish between opposing principles from those which 
endeavoured to reconcile and fuse them — an attempt to 
which they owe the success which they have enjoyed during 
the last half century. Thus stated, the change seems simple 
enough, but those who have to initiate it will soon realize 
that it involves a far reaching intellectual revolution. The 
whole question of German versus Latin culture, which has 
been the subject of such heated discussions since 19 14, con- 
tains in itself a dim presentiment of the necessity and diffi- 
culty of this intellectual revolution. Since that fateful date 
there has been one continual protest against the supremacy 
of the obscure and ill-balanced Teutonic genius over the 
lucid and harmonious Latin genius. How was it possible 
to prefer obscurity and complication to lucidity and simplic- 
ity? Why was the brilliant Latin genius dimmed by the 
fogs borne by the north wind from the forests of Germany ? 
Surely this state of things must come to an end. On all 
hands it is admitted that the Latin and the Germanic genius 
are irreconcilably opposed. What is the meaning of all 
these protests and recriminations? 

What has already been said, and a careful comparison of 
modern civilization with the civilizations of ancient times 
will help us again here. The lucidity of the Latin genius 
is merely the endeavour to define principles exactly, to pre- 
vent their being confused with one another, and conse- 
quently to lay down accurate and certain laws. German 
obscurity, which has so frequently been taken for depth, is 
the attempt to confound principles by weakening the force 
of laws. In philosophy, law, ethics, history, in every 
branch of learning indeed, the German mind has, more 
especially during the last two centuries, steadily confounded 
principles and definitions, demolished traditions, confused 



PROBLEMS OF THE NEW WORLD 209 

good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the 
false, in order to give a freer rein to passions and interests. 
The moral and intellectual confusion of our age is not 
wholly the work of the German mind; other peoples, even 
the Latin races themselves, have helped to bring it about, 
but there can be no doubt that the German mind has accom- 
plished more in this direction than any other, and it is just 
because it has been, often under the cloak of liberty, the most 
determined and energetic factor in this untold disorder, that 
in spite of or, it may be, on account of its faults, it has con- 
trived to obtain the pre-eminence in the modern world. It 
appealed to the tendencies of an age which would submit to 
no discipline but that imposed by work and the state and 
aspired in everything else, in art and private morals, in 
religion and family life, in business and pleasure alike, to 
an ever increasing measure of liberty. Even obscurity of 
form had become a virtue, since it served to conceal the in- 
coherence of contradictory doctrines, Kant, one of the 
most involved writers of any age or country, was the most 
highly esteemed philosopher of the nineteenth century : why? 
Because contradiction was the very essence of his system.' 
His materialistic spirituality, his absolute relativism, his 
theistic atheism, his free determinism, were admirably suited 
to a period which thought it did well to admit all principles, 
even to the most contradictory, so as to make use of them 
all. Obscurity was a valuable quality to a system which 
was based upon contradiction. H Kant had written like 
St. Thomas Aquinas or Descartes, the world would perforce 
have seen all those contradictions which he was anxious to 
conceal from it. 

The hatred of Germanism which is now prevalent leads 
us then to the same conclusion as the examination of the 
position of political parties and doctrines at the close of the 



glO EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

war. We must strive to emerge from the intellectual and 
moral confusion by which we were surrounded when the 
war broke out, and if we are to do so, we must make a 
great intellectual effort in the direction indicated by our 
analysis of this confusion. We must induce coming gen- 
erations to aim rather less at power and rather more at 
perfection; we must teach the mind to find enjoyment once 
more in lucidity of thought and simplicity of sentiment; we 
must familiarize man in a world grown so wide, and a 
civilization become so powerful, with the idea of the impass- 
able limits of truth, beauty, virtue, reason and power, which 
men understood so readily when they were weaker and more 
ignorant; we must discover scholars, artists, writers and 
philosophers endowed with not only the intelligence but also 
the moral force necessary for the accomplishment of this 
task. Will Europe be equal to this effort? The future 
alone can tell. It would seem, however, as if not only the 
possibility of a lasting peace, but the very existence of the 
older civilized peoples depended on this transformation. 
We have always felt somewhat out of place amid this 
confusion, which was only suited to nations, which, like the 
German peoples, were subject to fits of passion and attacks 
of collective madness. Of this the present crisis affords a 
proof. The governments of the nations now arrayed 
against Germany and Austria have frequently been re- 
proached for their lack of military preparedness. It is, 
however, beyond question that this unpreparedness, at least 
in so far as France, Great Britain and Italy are concerned, 
was not due merely to lack of foresight on the part of their 
respective governments. We allowed ourselves to be out- 
distanced by Germany in the race for armaments partly be- 
cause we realized that this race was madness and that the 
exaggeration of the system was making it absurd. Not 



PROBLEMS OF THE NEW WORLD Sll 

being blinded, like the German people, by pride, covetous- 
ness and ambition, we shrank from developing a system 
whose excesses, complications, difficulties, untold sacrifices 
and dangers were more or less clearly perceived by all 
nations. We were wrong, of course, and we are now ex- 
piating our mistake. This expiation will not, however, 
render reasoning nations better able to play their part in a 
world dominated by the absurd and its train of attendant 
passions. It is therefore a matter of life and death for us 
to lead the policy and institutions of Europe back to more 
humane and logical conceptions than those prevalent dur- 
ing the last half century, since in a world ruled by passions 
and theories carried to extreme, those of us who are rea- 
sonable beings will always be at a disadvantage and will 
end by becoming the victims of the madman and the tur- 
bulent. It is above all for this reason that we must do 
everything in our power to bring the war to a victorious 
end. We shall not deliver Europe from the insanity of 
which she all but died unless we succeed in defeating that 
army which is the master-piece of that rabid spirit to which 
Europe has been forced to submit for the last forty years — 
a spirit which she had even come to admire from time 
to time. This is the task of the soldiers of whom we think 
with such tenderness and with the hope that they may ac- 
complish it ere long and with such a meed of success that 
their sacrifices may not be in vain. When, however, their 
work is finished, the task of scholars, philosophers and law- 
yers will begin and we must only hope that their patience, 
tenacity and self-sacrifice will prove worthy of the soldiers 
who are preparing the way for better times — times in which 
Europe, far removed from the perils which menace her on 
every hand today, may live in peace and safety in the light 
of newer and loftier conceptions. 



CHAPTER VII 
The Great Contradiction 



THE GREAT CONTRADICTION 

When we consider the present state of things in Europe, 
we invariably find ourselves confronted by the question — 
a question as persistent as the importunate widow, a ques- 
tion which has never yet been satisfactorily answered — 
How is it that an epoch so concentrated on the increase of 
wealth, the greater security of life and the establishment 
of the universal rule of reason could prepare, will and wage 
this appalling conflict? We will make one more attempt 
to find the answer to this poignant and ever recurring ques- 
tion. 

I 

PATRIOTISM AND PROGRESS 

The old proverb tells us that " it is an ill wind that blows 
nobody good," and even in the terrible calamities of the 
world war we may find some ground for encouragement. 
It was commonly supposed that if a European war ever 
broke out, and reason and compassion failed to do their 
work, egotism would issue the order to lay down arms. 
It was further alleged that in every grade of society men 
had been too long accustomed to an easy and safe existence 
to endure the ruin and privation of a universal war. We 
were told that revolution would be the inevitable result 
if the war lasted more than three months. Our century 
was credited with the spirit of self-sacrifice and abnega- 
tion for a few weeks at most. The General Staffs of 
Europe recognized self-interest as their sovereign and de- 
clared that they would never go to war except in obedience 
to his orders. When the history of the Great War comes 

215 



gl6 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

to be written, it will be seen that almost all the blunders and 
cruelties of its early days were due to haste. The rulers 
who had willed the great adventure set out with the fixed 
idea that the campaign must be finished quickly because no 
nation would stand a long ordeal. Here, however, we did 
ourselves scant justice. None of these prophecies has been 
fulfilled. In July, 19 14, the dissensions which had so long 
troubled Europe seemed to take on a fresh lease of life. 
Civil war appeared imminent in Ireland. In France the 
two parties which had for centuries been at loggerheads, 
had flown at each other's throats in the confined area of 
the law courts. In Italy there had been a sort of dress re- 
hearsal of revolution. In Russia millions of workmen 
had gone on strike. In Austria each of the many races 
of which the Empire is composed was endeavouring to 
shift the blame for the assassination at Sarajevo on to the 
shoulders of its neighbours. But in the forty-eight hours 
from July 30th to August ist, when it became apparent 
that war was inevitable, all these dissensions were laid 
aside. Even France, the country whose geographical posi- 
tion and history alike have made it the storm centre of 
Europe for centuries — the land in which the struggle be- 
tween Teutonism and Latinism, Protestantism and Catholi- 
cism, authority and liberty, the principle of quantity and the 
principle of quality have never ceased — had but one heart 
and one soul, perhaps for the first time since the days of 
Julius Caesar. Not only did political and religious discords 
cease, but the mutual recriminations of riches and poverty 
also came to an end. Socialism betook itself to the near- 
est barracks and donned its uniform as meekly as a young 
conscript fresh from his native village. Moreover, today, 
after more than three years of war in which millions of 



THE GREAT CONTRADICTION 217 

men have been killed and wounded, untold wealth destroyed, 
and the whole order of things we had known for so many- 
years demolished, not one of the belligerent nations has 
uttered a cry for mercy. History had never subjected such 
an immense number of men to such an ordeal and the great 
ordeal has been so magnificently borne as to be almost 
miraculous. But each of the so-called miracles of history 
is a slow process accomplished secretly by time and sud- 
denly revealed to man in its completed state. We find 
the explanation of this miracle, too, in the revolutionary 
changes which began in Europe after the discovery of 
America to which we have so often turned for the key to 
the calamities of the present day changes, which by giving 
a fresh aim to existence, gradually rendered the world more 
uniform and hence more harmonious. It is of course 
obvious that modern civilization is more uniform than its 
predecessors; for proof of this assertion we only have to 
compare Europe and America, and the most ancient lands 
of Europe with its more modern countries. Most people, 
however, fail to realize clearly that this difference too results 
from the transition from ancient qualitative civilization to 
its modern quantitative successor. The man who aims at 
perfection must of necessity work in limited sphere; he 
must, that is to say, choose one of the innumerable types 
of perfection with which he is confronted, without, how- 
ever, concentrating all his powers of soul and intellect 
upon it or ignoring or rejecting all the rest, for there is 
no surer way of being mediocre in everything than to aim 
at too many different types of perfection. Variety, isola- 
tion and discord are consequently the very essence of all 
qualitative civilization, which aims at one or more types 
of perfection : hence the countless religious, artistic, literary. 



218 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

moral and political struggles which rent the world asunder 
in times past. At the present day the only violent struggles 
are those between races and languages, where one race is 
governed by another which wishes to force it into allegi- 
ance to an alien people and tongue. The other struggles 
— religious, artistic, literary, moral and political — have 
for the last fifty years been gradually growing feebler in 
both Europe and America. What is the reason of this 
change ? It is because in proportion as quantity dominates 
the world and man chooses the conquest of the earth as his 
aim rather than beauty, glory, heroism, honour, and holi- 
ness, the differences which in time gone by aroused such 
bitter hatred and caused so many wars gradually lose their 
force and finally vanish altogether. Europe still numbers 
among her inhabitants Catholics and Protestants, laymen 
and clergy, the proletariat, the middle classes and the 
nobility, the learned and the ignorant, romanticists and 
classicists, conservatives and liberals, monarchists and 
republicans, but the men of the present day hardly notice 
these differences when they are labouring together to con- 
quer the wealth of the world, — an enterprise in which noth- 
ing counts but skill, zeal and activity. An artisan, an em- 
ploye, an engineer or an official is estimated according 
to what he can do, not according to the religion he happens 
to profess. The upper classes may still have more refine- 
ment of manner, but the middle classes are richly endowed 
with the energy which the world holds of more account 
than manners, because it is of more service. The proletariat 
may be coarse and ignorant, but does that give the upper 
classes any right to look down upon them? If the masses 
did not work hard and spend their wages freely; if they 
were content, as in the good old times, to earn little and 
live poorly provided they had not to work too long, would 



JHE GREAT CONTRADICTION 219 

not the upper classes be impoverished? It is not difficult 
for the rich to show human sympathy for the masses in aiv 
era when they can love themselves in them. Literature 
has ceased to be a laborious striving after a high and envied 
degree of perfection and has become but a pastime or a 
weapon in the latest political and social struggles which 
rend the world asunder: provided that it fulfils these two 
purposes, one school or one style is the same as another 
to an eclectic and changeable public which has lost the 
very idea of the standards of perfection at which literature 
was wont to aim in times past. Monarchy and republic 
are two forms of government based upon different prin- 
ciples; but who has either time or leisure to fight for or 
against either of these principles in a century whose one 
object is to increase the wealth of the world? Republics, 
kingdoms and empires alike strive to enrich their respective 
peoples. It is therefore the part of wisdom to make the 
best of the existing regime. The last republicans will re- 
sign themselves to living in a monarchy and the last 
monarchists to living in a republic. Hence for the last 
century, during which man has devoted himself with grow- 
ing enthusiasm to the conquest of the earth to the neglect 
of every other enterprise and ambition, every nation of 
Europe and America has become a more or less homo- 
geneous mass, in which the struggles between opposing re- 
ligious, moral and aesthetic principles characteristic of pre- 
ceding civilizations, and even differences of religion, class 
and race have become obliterated and the spirit of isola- 
tion and discord has gradually grown weaker. This ac- 
counts for the accusations of materialism and of indiffer- 
ence to everything but wealth so frequently brought against 
our age — accusations which are, however, unmerited, since 
there are two mystic ideas which pervade the homo- 



no EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

geneous mass of modern nations and insure their coherence: 
patriotism and progress, — both very simple ideas or at all 
events ideas which can be simplified to such a degree as to 
bring them within the comprehension of even the most 
ignorant. Both are somewhat vague, by which I mean 
that they are more apt to excite than to restrain the dominant 
passions of the epoch and more especially the pride which 
plays such a prominent part among the sentiments actuating 
our century. The idea of progress is, as I have already 
pointed out, both contradictory and incoherent. Both 
these ideas may be regarded as mystic and transcendant, 
because they force man to sacrifice his egotism — today 
his pleasure, tomorrow his liberty, his most cherished 
opinions, his possessions and sometimes even his life to 
something which transcends them all — something invisible, 
something surrounded with the halo of a sacred mystery. 
Even if up to August ist, 19 14, man toiled from morning 
to night to increase the wealth of the world, did he enjoy 
the fruits of his toil? Why do we bear so many burdens 
— unceasing hard work, military service for a term of 
several years, the perpetual danger of war, innumerable 
taxes and countless civic duties — unless it be to further 
this ill-defined progress whose meaning we hardly under- 
stand and to create wealth which is more often than not a 
burden and a source of anxiety? This epoch, which is sup- 
posed to be so practical, is on the contrary mystical to the 
last degree, and that nation which is apparently the most 
practical of all, the American people, is the most mystical, 
since it more than any other strives to create wealth of which 
it has the least enjoyment! 

Do not let us be unjust to our epoch if we would under- 
stand the European War and find an explanation of its 
surprises. The sudden concord between the citizens of all 



THE GREAT CONTRADICTION 2^1 

the nations of Europe, the spirit of sacrifice of which they 
have given proof, are no inexplicable miracle. Europe 
desired peace, but when she saw the German menace, she 
met German concord with her own concord; she was able 
to put aside in a few days all religious and political dissen- 
sions, because they had for long been growing weaker and 
because the spirit of patriotism had spread in even the least 
homogeneous of nations. The fact that Germany had given 
the example made it easier for the various governments to 
obtain the ready consent of the whole people to every sacri- 
fice, and they were thus enabled, with the help of the power- 
ful means at the disposal of the modem state, to take posses- 
sion of both body and soul of their respective nations to 
such a degree as to make any subsequent repentance both 
useless and impossible. We see every nation bearing the 
unspeakable sacrifices of war with the utmost patience, 
either because in every nation, and more especially in those 
composed of a single race speaking the same language, the 
spirit of patriotism has pervaded even the most ignorant 
classes; or because they have pledged themselves to their 
Allies to fight to the bitter end, so that none can now draw 
back; the aggressors as a matter of honour and for fear 
of the reprisals they so well deserve and the victims from 
the necessity of defending themselves and the thirst for 
vengeance. 

We thus find ourselves brought to the happiest of con- 
clusions. We have really been bom in the Golden Age 
of legend and poetry! The doctrine of progress cannot 
deceive us, even if we cannot define it accurately! The 
world is really on the path of progress, since we possess 
all this world's goods — wealth, power, learning, concord 
and the spirit of sacrifice ; since we are capable of living 
in peace and yet know how to make war. The century 



22a EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

which we reproached with materiaUsm, concealed un- 
suspected treasures of heroisrn. 

II 

THE TWO SIDES OF PROGRESS 

This conclusion is, however, too optimistic and too hasty. 
The doctrine of progress in which we have hitherto believed 
was ambiguous if not actually false, and its ambiguity has 
involved us in the present crisis. When I was travelling 
in America and comparing that continent with the classical 
world which had for so many years been my spiritual home ; 
when I was subjecting the innumerable contradictions in- 
herent in our idea of progress to the searchlight of analysis, 
and gazing at the world half sadly as it struggled and strove 
for something newer and better without really knowing 
what, I had never for a moment imagined that within a 
few short years one of these contradictions would bring 
about such a catastrophe. The student who would trace 
the causes of the European War back to their remotest 
origin, passing in review one by one the intrigues of diplo- 
matists, the sinister plans of General Staffs, the ambitions of 
governments, the jealousies of nations, the agitations of the 
press, the random utterances of paid philosophers, the 
rivalries of industry and commerce, the turmoils of decadent 
empires, the sufferings of oppressed peoples, the pride, 
ambition and dreams of the German nation and its tendency 
to overshoot the mark, will find himself led step by step 
to one of the numerous contradictions in the midst of which 
we have lived for the last century — the great contradiction 
from which we have never succeeded in liberating our- 
selves — the mania for increasing the power of man with- 



THE GREAT CONTRADICTION 223 

out troubling to distinguish between the creative and the 
destructive power. .When science made some new dis- 
covery, when industry constructed some more rapid and 
powerful machine, when we coimted our riches and found 
that they had increased, we were convinced that the world 
was progressing. Had our century not undertaken to con- 
quer the whole earth with the help of fire and science? 
Was not every step which brought us nearer this goal to be 
regarded as progress ? Europe and America had therefore 
advanced by abandoning the old time coaches for trains 
and sailing boats for steamers; by inventing the telegraph, 
the telephone, the motorcar, the aeroplane and the dirigible ; 
by acquiring the knowledge and the means enabling it to 
pierce the Isthmus of Panama; by constructing reaping, 
threshing, measuring, ploughing and sewing machines and 
other machines for making shoes, driving in nails, and per- 
forming at lightning speed many other operations for which 
for centuries man had no other apparatus than his hand. 

Nor is this all. Our era, consistently with its own defini- 
tion of progress, extolled activity, discipline, obedience, 
courage, energy, initiative, ambition and self-confidence as 
the noblest of virtues; its heroes were self-made men, 
fortunate or unfortunate inventors, pioneers of every sort 
of aspiration, leaders of revolutionary movements in art, 
industry, religion, banking, fashion and politics. Our epoch, 
however, has not confined itself to constructing railways, 
ships, ploughs and threshing machines; it has not merely 
discovered marvellous remedies, and how to make electricity 
produce a brilliant light, and learned to talk and write across 
space; it has also manufactured rifles, guns, ironclads, and 
explosives a hundred times more powerful and more deadly 
than those known to our fathers and grandfathers. It 
enlarged and beautified schools, hospitals and libraries; but 



224< EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

with what appalling weapons it has furnished the greatest 
armies the world has ever seen ! Are we to be equally proud 
of both these types of progress? It is a difficult question 
to answer. If we answer it in the affirmative, we were 
virtually adopting Hegelianism, venerating destruction as 
much as creation and worshipping God and the devil on the 
same altar — a view revolting to an epoch which believed 
in the goodness of human nature and strove so hard to in- 
crease the wealth of the world. If, however, we answer 
it in the negative, universal disarmament, the dethronement 
of the monarchies at the head of the present armies, the 
reconstruction of the map of Europe and a far-reaching 
change in the spirit of the modern state should necessarily 
have followed. For such sweeping changes Europe had not 
the courage. She took refuge in ambiguity and a definition 
of progress sufficiently vague to cover both peace and war, 
justice and violence, life and death, steam ploughs and 
Lewis guns, Pasteur serum and melinite. She shrank from 
saying definitely whether the same meed of admiration was 
to be accorded to audacity, courage, self-sacrifice, initiative 
and perseverance when displayed in wars of aggression as 
when employed in the struggle against nature. She has 
always halted between two opinions. The century de- 
manded peace, but its teaching was received with such ironic 
smiles by so many soldiers, philosophers and politicians that 
it lost heart, and the century which had dared so much did 
not venture even to repeat what St. Thomas Aquinas boldly 
affirmed amid the barbarism of the Middle Ages — that 
war is only justifiable when waged in a good cause and 
without evil intention. 

Thus the day dawned when Germany set Europe ablaze. 
She dared this crime just because she had brought to greater 
perfection than any other nation this very conception of 



THE GREAT CONTRADICTION 225 

progress which reconciles the idea of destruction with that 
of creation by affirming boldly that a people must strive 
to be great in peace and war alike, and that it is no less 
meritorious and glorious for it to force other nations to sub- 
mit to its will than for it to conquer nature and wrest her 
secrets from her. The victories of 1866 and 1870, the 
development of her industries, the increase of both her 
population and her wealth, the lack of feeling for humanity 
and of sense of proportion characteristic of the German 
mentality, the wave of overweening pride, ambition and 
cupidity which has swept over Germany during the last few 
years explain how she has been able to reconcile two such 
contradictory principles in her hybrid definition of 
progress; how she could manufacture instruments of life and 
death without apparently any feeling of incongruity, build 
factories and barracks, merchant ships and ironclads; how 
she could at one and the same time be a vast factory and 
a vast entrenched camp, by regarding progress as a two- 
faced deity, inciting men to become at once wealthier and 
more redoubtable, more learned and more cruel, more in- 
dustrious and more violent. Then, when she had reached 
the very zenith of prosperity and power, she thought she 
had also reached the apex of strength and challenged three 
great nations to a deadly combat, and the great butchery 
began — that butchery whose end cannot be foreseen, since 
this war differs from all previous struggles in that it knows 
no limits whether of space, time or form. 

Ill 

K RUTHLESS WAR 

In all preceding wars, even in that of 1870, only part 
of the nation was engaged — that young, vigorous sec- 



2£6 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

tion which was already trained in the use of arms. The 
forces on which each nation could count were limited and 
wars were consequently short, violent and decisive. In the 
present war several of the great belligerent nations have 
ceased to take into account either age, weakness, lack of 
training or family circumstances: every man capable of 
learning in a few weeks how to handle a gun is pressed 
into the service. It may indeed truthfully be said that even 
women and old men have been mobilized, since those who 
are not actually fighting are taking the place of those on 
active service in all kinds of civil employment, caring for 
the wounded and helping families whose heads are away. 
One almost wonders whether the war will not be brought 
to an end by beardless lads and white-haired men. The 
participation of all Europe in the wars of the French Revo- 
lution and the Empire had appeared something at once 
tremendous and unheard of: this time Europe, the whole 
of North America and many of the South American States, 
British India, China, Japan, Siam, a large part of Africa 
and all the British overseas dominions are involved — 
practically the whole civilized world. When the war broke 
out, we all thought it could not possibly last more than a 
few months; forty months have elapsed and, unless some 
miracle happens, there seems nothing to prevent its dragging 
on for many another weary month. Although it is certain 
that the Great War must come to an end some day, like 
everything else In the world, and it is not unlikely that the 
end may be sudden, we can as yet catch no glimpse of the 
bound set to this fresh instance of human folly; nor do 
we see any signs of a limit to the ruthlessness of those 
of the belligerents who apparently propose to wage warfare 
with no regard to the dictates of laws, conventions or prin- 
ciples of compassion and humanity. 



THE GREAT CONTRADICTION 227 

Even legend has no records of such a struggle — a 
struggle involving such hosts of combatants, such pro- 
longed battles, such wholesale destruction of life and prop- 
erty, such arousing of the fiercest passions of mankind. 
Modern civilization is more powerful than any of its 
predecessors, but it will brook neither curb nor limit, and is 
consequently lacking in discernment. It creates and de- 
stroys, does good and evil according to the dictates of self- 
interest and the circumstances or passions of the moment, 
and it does both in accordance with its character, that is to 
say, on a large scale. For three generations it busied it- 
self colonizing new countries, opening up new routes, in- 
creasing riches, learning and machinery, teaching and dis- 
ciplining the masses, and it must be admitted that it ac- 
complished marvels. When, however, in a moment of mad- 
ness it turned its energies to destruction, it achieved its 
object to an equally great degree. Are not the very virtues 
— concord, patriotism, the spirit of self-sacrifice — evoked 
by the war also the very reason why this fierce struggle 
has lasted so long? Germany, France, Belgium, Serbia, 
Russia, Austria and the rest have been fighting now for 
years; now the one, now the other side gaining the upper 
hand; countless thousands have fallen and yet the war is 
still going on. Why? Because the conflict has ceased to 
be merely between armies and states and is being waged 
by whole peoples, each and all of them equally determined 
to conquer at any cost, because they are one and all animated 
by that mystic spirit of patriotism which adds fresh fuel 
to the fires of pride and love of domination on the one side 
and inspires their opponents with the determination to 
avenge the wrong inflicted upon them by their aggressors. 
This too explains why the defeats and victories of this war 
are never decisive. Battles which do not end in the an- 



228 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

nihilation of the forces of one or other side — and such 
decisive battles are rare — have no effect beyond the moral 
impression they make : hence a people may be defeated re- 
peatedly w^ithout being conquered provided it does not lose 
heart and hope. The v^ars waged by the ancient Romans 
afford endless proofs of the truth of this assertion, for there 
has never been a nation w^hich v^^as often more defeated or 
v^on more w^ars. Were we then self-deceived when we 
flattered ourselves that our civilization had attained a higher 
degree of perfection than any of its predecessors? It 
would almost appear so. There are compensating circum- 
stances in everything. The men of the Middle Ages were 
undoubtedly poorer, coarser and more ignorant than our- 
selves ; they had no railways, no aeroplanes, no submarines ; 
on the other hand they never so much as dreamed of the 
horrors witnessed almost as a matter of course by Europe 
today : cities burned down, millions of men killed, mutilated, 
burned alive, blown up by appalling explosions, great vessels 
sinking in a few minutes with their living freight. The 
Europe of 13 17 was a paradise compared to the Europe of 
1917: and this is the result of six centuries of progress — 
progress which surely gives the Chinese, Indians and other 
peoples to whom we are wont to consider ourselves so 
superior, every right to smile ironically — progress which 
fills the soul of many a European with deep distrust. Is 
this progress ? we may well ask. We can no longer let the 
question pass in silence, as we have done hitherto, claiming 
that the answer is to be found in our deeds rather than in 
our words ; for our desire to advance without wasting time 
defining progress and taking for granted that everything 
which served our purpose or ministered to our pleasure 
for the time being must necessarily be progress, has brought 
us to the point of destroying in a few months the treasures 



THE GREAT CONTRADICTION 229 

which it has taken us years to accummulate and of being 
f^.^ed to look on helplessly at the wholesale massacre of 
our young men. And this in an age which has even set up 
societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals! The 
masses have every right to ask those who in the name of 
progress led them to this fiery ordeal whether they are not 
themselves deluded. The Chinese and Indians may well ask 
if the European War is to be regarded as another proof 
of that civilization which we are so anxious they should 
adopt. How many of us can be certain that the horrified 
world will not answer by rejecting as false that progress 
of which Europe was so proud? 



IV 

NEW STRENGTH AND ANCIENT WISDOM 

And yet it is not really so. The progress in which we 
have perhaps believed somewhat too readily is not altogether 
a delusion; it is rather one of the laws of life which at times 
seems to be deceptive, simply because it is obscure and we 
do not as yet understand it, although we are not insensible 
to its influence. 

It is beyond the power of man to foretell the future, 
but we may none the less venture to assume that history 
will look upon the European War as the crisis of a civiliza- 
tion which prided itself on having enabled human energy 
to throw off the chains and shackles which had hampered 
it in the civilizations of the past, but proved powerless to 
hold it in check when it fell a prey to the lust of destruction : 
the crisis of a civilization which, after exhausting three 
generations in laborious creative work, is now destroying 
the fourth with all its heaped up wealth for the selfsame 



230 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

reason — because it knows no bounds either for good or 
evil. The first great crisis of that society to which Social- 
ists apply the epithet capitalist (from the order of things 
established by the nineteenth century in both Europe and 
America) is the European War: a crisis very different from 
that predicted by Socialists and no less so from the last 
great historical crisis — the French Revolution. Then, an 
age thirsting for liberty, wealth, power and learning arose 
and overthrew all the ancient barriers which stood in the 
way of the realization of its aspirations; today we see 
tottering to its fall, wounded to death, an age, which after 
winning for itself liberty, power, science and all the treasures 
earth has to offer, has fallen victim to a mania which 
prompts it to destroy not only itself but all the fruit of its 
labours as well. 

One of two things must happen. Either it will rise again, 
its wounds closed, to resume as soon as it has sufficiently 
recovered its strength, its course towards its old goal — 
that goal which recedes as fast as man marches towards it 
— in which case the European War will have been but a 
parenthesis in the history of the twentieth century, a terrible 
but transitory incident like an earthquake or a flood — a use- 
less warning to man — the first rehearsal as it were, of a 
still more appalling catastrophe to take place in fifty or a 
hundred years; or else this war will cure the world once 
for all of the mania which had taken possession of it, forc- 
ing it to ask itself what use it has made in the past and what 
use it should make in the future of its unbounded power — 
a question which will mark the dawn of real progress. I see 
no way out of the apparently insoluble difficulties with 
which thought and action are confronted when thought 
would fain define progress, and action is equally anxious 
to put it into practice, save the admission that each epoch ac- 



THE GREAT CONTRADICTION 231 

complishes but a portion of the never ending and multifari- 
ous task set humanity as a whole. Some civilizations have 
produced works of art and systems of philosophy; others 
political institutions ; others have given birth to religions and 
rituals; others to fresh developments of industry and com- 
merce and others again to weapons and the tactics of war. 
All these incomplete labours of successive generations are 
contributions towards a whole, and true progress lies in the 
slow but constant additions made to their number — the 
only way in which we can hope to reconcile quality and 
quantity in our definition of progress, for each successive 
generation possesses a larger number of qualitative prin- 
ciples ; or, in other words, a larger number of aesthetic, politi- 
cal, religious and moral principles, allowing of a greater 
wealth of combinations and of a fuller and more original 
life. 

Let us take an example. If we compare ourselves with 
the ancient Greeks or Romans or with the peoples of the 
Middle Ages, we shall undoubtedly find that we are superior 
to them in some respects, though inferior in others. The 
Greeks were superior to us in art and literature ; the Romans 
in law; the Middle Ages in certain branches of art, such 
as architecture. On the other hand, we are much wealthier, 
much more learned and much more powerful than the 
Greeks, the Romans, or the peoples of the Middle Ages. 
When confronted with these differences how are we then to 
decide whether the world has made progress in the centuries 
which have passed since the days of the ancient Greeks? If 
we are to answer such a question, we much first decide 
whether it is better to be a scholar or an artist, to construct 
steam engines or build beautiful cathedrals, to explore Africa 
or be the creator of " Antigone." It is, however, obvious 
that every man and every age believe the work accomplished 



23a EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

by himself and his age to be the most useful and the noblest 
of all, and that it is impossible to prove that riches are of 
greater or less value than beauty, or beauty of greater or 
less value than science. All the lines of argument by which 
one or other of these points is supposed to have been proved 
take for granted a definition of progress in vi^hich the thesis 
to be proved is already tacitly admitted; they therefore 
merely amount to sophisms which only interest and passion 
could seriously look upon as arguments at all. We may, 
however, fairly affirm that the world has progressed when 
we compare our epoch as a whole with ancient Greece, for 
we enjoy Greek art and literature; we are acquainted with 
her philosophy; we have adopted some of her views and 
political principles, while we are acquainted with other arts 
unknown to the Greeks, mediaeval architecture, and Japa- 
nese sculpture, amongst others ; we are acquainted with other 
systems of philosophy; we practise the virtues taught by 
Christianity, such as love of our neighbour, charity and 
purity; we add to their political principles those to which 
the French Revolution gave birth; we possess far wider 
geographical and scientific knowledge; we travel by rail- 
way, we speak across space and have learned to fly. 

If this is what we understand by progress, a little light 
is shed on the moral problems raised by the European War. 
The increase of wealth, learning and power only constitutes 
progress if we make of this wealth, learning and power a 
wiser, nobler and finer use. We shall, however, never learn 
to do so of ourselves and starting, as it were, from nothing 
if we make no attempt to blend the ideas, sentiments and 
principles transmitted to us by past generations with those 
which we ourselves have created. The ancient civilizations 
knew how to hold man in check and thus prevent him from, 
committing great and dangerous acts of folly, but at the 



THE GREAT CONTRADICTION 233 

same time they limited his power of initiation and action. 
Modern civilization exalted human energy by freeing it 
from every fetter, and has enabled it to accomplish wonders, 
but it has at the same time removed the bonds which re- 
strained it from committing acts of supreme folly. Our 
civilization will reach the zenith of glory and perfection 
when, by tempering the new powers it has created with the 
ancient wisdom it has forgotten, it succeeds in subduing 
the disorderly energies of men to the moderating influence 
of aesthetic, moral, religious and philosophical rules and prin- 
ciples which shall set a limit to them — a limit as wide 
as you will, but none the less clear and well defined. His- 
torians and philosophers would accomplish ends of far 
greater value if they would endeavour to prepare the mind 
of man for this fusion of two great civilizations which may 
give birth to a third civilization of a higher type than either, 
instead of wasting their time on discussions as to whether 
Romulus ever lived or not, or toying with eighteenth cen- 
tury theories of knowledge. 

When exhausted Europe has laid down her arms and 
is forced to ask herself what she ought to do in order to 
provide for the future, will she not find herself face to face 
with the eternal question which confronts man at the end 
of every path which he takes in search of happiness — the 
question of limits? If after the European War the differ- 
ent Powers begin once more to increase their armies and 
fleets just as they did from 1870 to 19 14, we shall sooner 
or later find ourselves back at the same point. Europe, 
drained as she has been of her life blood, can only hope to 
recover her strength if the belligerent Powers come to a 
serious understanding as to the limitation of armaments — 
a condition easy to propose, but extremely difficult to carry 
into effect, since there is nothing from which the modern 



234 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

world shrinks so much as the suggestion of any sort of 
limitation — no matter what the motive. I have already 
remarked that St. Thomas Aquinas asserts and proves war 
to be a sin in itself, that is to say, an evil, but adds that 
it may become permissible on three conditions: i. e., that 
it be waged by lawful authority in a just cause and without 
evil intention. The subtle teacher of the Middle Ages had 
foreseen wars waged in a just cause but with evil intention. 
Who can fail to see that this view of war is the one ap- 
pealing most strongly to all those who have not interested 
motives for desiring the continuance of the war or are not 
totally devoid of that sense of humanity which German 
philosophy has done so much to blunt even in ourselves? 
Who can fail to see that to ensure Europe a true and last- 
ing peace all that is necessary is that these principles should 
be put into practice ? Yet in the nineteenth century you will 
find few thinkers who ventured to uphold such teaching 
boldly without being somewhat ashamed of what was re- 
garded as an old woman's idea! How is this strange dis- 
crepancy to be explained? Only by the fact that almost 
all modern systems of philosophy have started from them- 
selves and have refused to submit their investigations to any 
of the limits respected more or less voluntarily by the sys- 
tems of antiquity, or even to those imposed by common 
sense or the sense of humanity, which shrink from every 
doctrine and every principle which is opposed to the most ob- 
vious requirements of human nature. These various sys- 
tems of philosophy, thus emancipated from the bands of 
discipline and surrounded by so many different passions and 
interests, held the sound common sense of St. Thomas 
Aquinas in utter contempt and, reversing each other's argu- 
ments, proved war to be either divine or diabolical, those 
taking the former view maintaining that to carry off the 



THE GREAT CONTRADICTION 235 

victory in war is to give evidence of the highest degree 
of perfection; while their opponents asserted with equal 
conviction that war was utterly degrading and should never 
be resorted to by civilized peoples even to repel aggression ! 
If it was diffcult to induce our age to accept reasonable 
theories as to war and its limits, is it likely to be easy to 
induce it to act reasonably? Yet who can doubt that 
modern civilization will end by destroying itself with its 
own hands if it does not learn to use its terrible powers 
with more judgment? Our descendants will perhaps say 
that our century played with machine- and quick-firing guns, 
shells and millions of soldiers like a child with a box of 
matches without realizing how terrible its toys would be 
when put to real use: the century must grow up and learn 
to handle such engines of warfare with the prudence de- 
manded by their dangerous character. We must pray the 
shades of our fathers to let their wisdom, which we have 
too long neglected, help Europe out of the difficult pass to 
which her pride and foolhardiness have brought her. We 
must above all invoke the shades of those great writers of 
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who taught man 
that there might and should be such a thing as national 
as well as individual justice — a sentiment which, like so 
many of those newer conceptions which dignify our age 
' — had its birth in eighteenth century France. It found a 
refuge in hearts and books and thus survived the devastating 
wars of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the 
nineteenth century. Gradually, during the long period 
of hopes and regrets which followed the fall of the first 
Empire, it ventured out of its hiding places and spread 
secretly over Europe under the suspicious eyes of the police, 
winning thousands of hearts and intellects, until the memor- 
able year 1848, when it seemed to establish its sway over 



236 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

all Europe in a few brief weeks and to become the ruler 
of a new and happier world. Disillusion swiftly followed, 
however! How distant was its triumph still! The politi- 
cal and economic upheavals of the second half of the nine- 
teenth century, the era of steel and steam, the blatant 
triumph of quantity, the clash of classes and interests, the 
advent of the middle classes, were all still to come. This 
great conception was no longer the object of police perse- 
cution, but rather that of ridicule and contempt. The at- 
tempt was made to isolate it by closing every door to it; 
it was banished from school and parliament alike. In every 
country more or less successful efforts were made to provoke 
admiration of Bismarck in the hope that the mere sight 
of his bull-dog countenance would chill the souls in whom 
the new ideas had lighted the fire of enthusiasm. The ef- 
forts to win the minds of men made by the new conception 
were met by governments and political parties with an ever 
increasing production of new weapons, with the appoint- 
ment of philosophers and philosophasters to burnish up in 
press and university alike old theories, such as Hegelianism, 
which might be turned to account as antidotes. It was ac- 
cused of being half Catholic, half Protestant ; Catholic, be- 
cause it aspired to be transcendent and eternal; Protestant, 
because it claimed to be the offspring of reason: as if a con- 
ception could forfeit the right to act as a guide to truth or be- 
come an imposture merely because it is able to give an ac- 
count of itself and justify its laws. In spite of all these 
criticisms, however, the conception did not perish, simply be- 
cause it was a true conception springing from the very depths 
of the soul of man, and it may yet save Europe from ruin, 
because it knows how to set limits to the pride, the ambition 
and the passion for power of the different peoples. We 
must therefore bring about a revival of this principle in the 



THE GREAT CONTRADICTION ^7 

soul of man and call in the aid of reason in order to give 
definite form to its precepts; we must let it exercise 
dominion in Europe over the masses who are looking on in 
horror at the present catastrophe — those masses whom the 
age of quality has made arbiters of almost everything and 
more especially of peace and war. 



BACCHUS IN BONDS 

It is given to none of us to be able to foretell what the 
future holds in store. We may, however, before con- 
cluding these pages, turn our attention for a moment to an 
indication which time has already made plain — a sign per- 
haps slight in itself but which may encourage us to hope 
that the conscience of Europe is really progressing, not 
with halting and uncertain steps as in so many other direc- 
tions on which we none the less prided ourselves — but 
making real advances, thanks to the revival of old principles, 
in the midst of the powerful but outrageous disorder of the 
modern world. 

The ancients numbered wine among the gods, because 
they regarded as divine a drink which, taken in moderation, 
soothed pain, stimulated the imagination, promoted cheer- 
fulness and stirred the mind; but during the last century 
the ancient deity has appeared upon earth in so many and 
different forms as to forfeit his status as god and sink to 
that of a demon, begetting madness, crime, sterility, pov- 
erty and death instead of joy and gladness, as of old. 
We all know the disastrous results all over the world of 
this disease, to which the medical profession has given 
the name alcoholism, but in Russia and France two of 



238 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

its worst forms — vodka and absinthe — had wrought more 
havoc than anywhere else. It is therefore not surprising 
that in these countries special efforts should have been made 
to stay the plague. Statesmen, scientists, philanthropists, 
priests, moralists, industrial magnates, schoolmasters and 
estimable women all had some panacea to offer. Countless 
commissions were appointed, countless societies founded, 
countless laws promulgated during the last twenty five 
years to cope with the evil and convert men to sobriety, 
while of the making of books with the same object there 
was no end. But in spite of all the efforts of these many 
physicians, the evil steadily increased in every country and 
more especially in Russia and France. The remedy was 
apparently not to be found. Church and school were alike 
impotent. The workman listened to the good advice given 
him and then betook himself to the nearest public-house 
for another glass. Many of the would-be physicians came 
to the conclusion that man is naturally vicious and that it 
is useless to try to prevent him from going to perdition 
in the quest of pleasure. Some even sought excuses for 
the vice. Was it really so fatal as was supposed? Was 
there anything else which could do as much to lighten the 
burden of the toiler in modern industry? Every man 
tries at times to escape as best he can in imagination from 
the fetters which hold him captive in the world into the 
'unbounded freedom of infinity, and the glass of wine or 
spirits may serve as the gateway into the infinite for the 
workman who knows no other means of escape. 

Accordingly Europe indulged freely in strong drink, 
although many thoughtful people who did not share the 
illusions of the optimist felt their hearts sink as they watched 
noble peoples thus degrading themselves. And there seemed 
no hope of finding a remedy. Then the European War 



THE GREAT CONTRADICTION 239 

broke out and the authorities, realizing that if drunkenness 
be a dangerous vice in time of peace, it is far more so in 
time of war, when both those who fight and those who 
remain at home must make the best possible use of their 
mental powers for the common weal, decided on a drastic 
measure — a remedy so heroic that no one had ventured 
to suggest it seriously before — the prohibition of the man- 
ufacture and consumption of the most harmful beverages. 
The egg of Columbus with a vengeance! When the work- 
man and the peasant can no longer turn into the nearest 
public-house for a glass of some pernicious drink, they 
will cease to get drunk, or at all events will do so much less 
often. No sooner said than done : half measures are not 
for wartime. On the day after the proclamation of mar- 
tial law, the military authorities in France prohibited the 
sale of absinthe, and when Parliament met it lost no time 
in passing a bill prohibiting for ever the manufacture, 
sale and import of absinthe. A few weeks after the out- 
break of war, the Tsar closed all distilleries and places 
where vodka was made or sold, vodka being in Russia a 
state monopoly. And while it cannot of course be said 
that no vodka or absinthe is consumed in Russia and France 
— since evasion of the law will continue as long as the 
world exists — temperance has steadily increased and the 
evil effects of drink have equally steadily decreased. 

Why were so many years and a cataclysm like the 
European War necessary for the discovery and application 
of the remedy? — the only efficacious way of keeping the 
intemperance of the people in check. If the men of two 
or three centuries ago were in certain respects much worse 
off than ourselves, they were undoubtedly also much more 
temperate, simply because they did not distil so many kinds 
of spirits every year, they did not press so many tons of 



240 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

grapes, so that no one person could drink more than a 
moderate amount, A few wealthy drinkers might possibly 
ruin their health, but such a proceeding was not in the power 
of the poor and those of moderate means. Why have men 
taken to drink to such an alarming extent during the last 
century, a period which coincides with the dawn of the 
era of quantity? Because the nineteenth century planted 
vines in thousands of acres of hitherto uncultivated land, 
even upon land snatched from Islam, even on land beyond 
the ocean; because it enlarged and added immensely to the 
number of breweries ; because it invented countless new and 
ingenious ways of distilling alcohol from endless different 
substances; because it manufactured in great distilleries all 
over the world liquors of which only a few bottles had 
hitherto been made annually by private families after some 
traditional receipt. Then when it had distilled so many 
intoxicating drinks, modern industry had to find some 
means of ensuring their consumption. It is useless to say 
that all these intoxicating liquors are made to satisfy the 
demands of a thirsty world, that vice is the cause and not 
the effect of the immense increase in the wine, beer and 
liquor trades. No — here, as elsewhere — industry first 
created abundance and then persuaded man that it was his 
duty to consume its whole production. 

It is therefore clear that as long as industry is free to 
distil as much intoxicating liquor as it chooses, just as it 
is at liberty to weave as many yards of linen or cloth as 
it likes, alcoholism will increase in the world. The trade 
will be driven to manufacture such drinks in ever increasing 
quantities and the world will have to swallow veritable 
floods of beer, wine and spirits every year. The brewery 
and the public-house will encourage men to drink more 
than they need both night and morning, Sunday and week- 



THE GREAT CONTRADICTION 241 

day, for man is naturally inclined to excess in his pleasures, 
and, if you make vice easy for him, he will not fail to take 
advantage thereof. Our age first gives men full liberty 
to drink to excess, and then is amazed that they do so, just 
in the same way as having created the vastest armies history 
has ever seen, and provided them with the most murderous 
weapons, it fails to understand how the vastest and most 
bloody war of all ages can possibly have broken out. The 
cause of its surprise is the same in both cases. Our age 
has created the greatest armies of all time not because it 
intended to bring about its own ruin in a world war, but 
because no power, or mortal power, or authority existed 
in Europe strong enough to set a limit to the competition 
of armaments. It left vice full liberty, not from perversity 
or corruption, but because in its anxiety to further industry 
and commerce, it shrank from setting any limit — even that 
demanded by health, morals and beauty — to the increase 
of wealth; it furthered productive industries and at the 
same time encouraged men to consume as much as they 
could, to eat, drink, smoke, amuse themselves, wear out 
and renew their clothing, travel, and seek for the greatest 
available measure of comfort. But in order to achieve all 
this it had to abolish the standards which in past ages 
distinguished wise expenditure from extravagance, and the 
undue growth of desire, since, had these criteria been as 
clear and definite as they were two centuries ago, they would 
have set limits to this liberty of expansion of which modern 
industries are so jealous; and in the same way it has failed 
to distinguish between the services rendered by science and 
industry to peace and those rendered to war. 

The European War put an immediate end to this contra- 
diction so far as drink was concerned. It has already 
brought certain of the European peoples back to the prin- 



242 EUROPE'S FATEFUL HOUR 

ciples which ruled the world two or three centuries ago. In 
the face of immediate danger all have had to realize that 
the State has both the right to prevent the people committing 
suicide by excessive drinking and is bound to exercise that 
right; that the welfare of the race and the interests of 
public morals must and should set a limit to the full liberty 
of indulging in pleasure to excess which individuals had 
claimed as a right for the last century. Will Europe under- 
stand equally quickly that war ought not to be — as it is 
in Europe today — the savage explosion of all the forces 
of destruction and sacrifice, love and hatred, good and evil 
accumulated by human nature in the course of a generation, 
until the whole physical and moral strength of a nation is 
exhausted — something like a natural force, subject to no 
law? Will it understand that war should be a human 
institution like justice, a sign and symbol of the strength of 
a people, as true and adequate as possible to what they 
represent, but limited, if it is not to become a scourge of 
God and a means of exterminating victors, vanquished and 
neutrals alike? 

The future will show. The obscure, powerful will of the 
masses who are today engaged in this titanic war will 
decide. The essential thing today is an act of will — a 
great act of will on the part of the masses. During the 
last two centuries man has inverted the order of things in 
which his fathers lived so long ; he has begun that new and 
marvellous history of the world, whose final crisis is taking 
place today, because he has determined to have liberty, 
wealth, power and knowledge. Our children and grand- 
children will enjoy peace if they really desire it, by en- 
deavouring to realize in what the essential conditions of a 
real and lasting peace consist. At this moment when so 
many men are in arms keeping a watch on one another with 



THE GREAT CONTRADICTION 248 

field glasses and cannon, by land and water, it is well to 
repeat to the soldiers of the new alliance — this time a Holy 
Alliance in very truth — the soldiers of the Powers which 
have had to endure this war, because the Central Empires 
forced it upon them, the memorable words of St, Augustine, 
words worthy of being taken as the motto of the newer and 
better Europe for which we all hope, for which so many 
have already given their lives : " Esto ergo hellando 
pacificiis, ut cos quos expitgnas, ad pads utilitatem vincendo 
perducas." 



THE END 



Deackiihed using t(w Bookkeeper pfoces*."^ 
Nt)utralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
lit.a!MientD^te: ^^Y ?001 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PREaeRVATIOM 

^ J .v , u>«n4h»v PA twee 



